The Flea Palace (16 page)

In the meanwhile, Su, placed by Celal in front of the mirror right next to the old woman, kept rotating her chair to observe her surroundings with a genuine curiosity brought about by being at the beauty parlour for the first time. Unfortunately, she had to cut her study short since wherever she turned she would encounter female eyes staring at her and rouged lips talking about her. The only person in this strange place who did not inspect her with such a sticky stare, thought Su, was the old woman sitting by her side. She knew her. She was their next door neighbour whom she ran into from time to time and who was always so nice to her. Now, with her tiny, overly made-up face sticking out of the plastic smock covering her entire upper body all the way to her neck, the old woman looked like a bust placed askew on its base, impishly painted in all colours.

Noticing the girl’s gaze on her, Madam Auntie turned aside and gave her a smile. It seemed as if she was on the verge of
saying something but Celal appeared right at that instant with a rectangular wooden plank. Whenever a child came to the beauty parlour, the twins placed this plank on top of the arms of the chairs to extend the height of the small customer. However, as soon as Su had fathomed Celal’s intention, she fervently shook her head from side to side, glancing all the while at the old woman. ‘But I am taller than her!’ she finally protested in a piercing voice. ‘Why doesn’t she sit on the plank too?’

The objection was more than enough to leave Celal, who had never been much of a speechmaker anyway, speechless. On seeing that in response to the girl’s outrageous remark, Madame Auntie was so far from being offended that she was actually laughing, he handed the plank back to the apprentice without pimples. Right afterward, however, as if having sensed a secret wisdom in the child’s words, he carefully observed through the mirror the reflections of his two unusual customers. Sitting there side by side in front of the wide and long mirror with leopard-patterned smocks around their necks, they were startlingly alike. In point of fact they stood on two opposite poles of time – one was eleven, the other seventy-eight, and yet both existed somewhere on the borderland of the human life-span. Su was mistaken. She was no taller than the old woman. Actually they were exactly the same height and maybe even the same weight. Uncanny as it was, that the frame an old person kept shrinking into would equal the frame a child had been growing into, they were like two elevators having fleetingly stopped at the same level while one was on the way up and the other down. After a second, an hour, a month… one of them would inevitably grow taller than they were at the moment, while the other would move correspondingly in the other direction, and no longer would they be alike. It was extraordinary that they had found each other, thought Celal, at this point of ephemeral equality.

Once he had found a resemblance between the old woman and the girl, it would not take Celal long to duplicate his love for the former by carving out a similar affection for the latter.
That is precisely why he personally undertook not only the preparation of the girl’s hair for trimming but also the trimming itself. He let loose the thick, curly, ebony hair tied up haphazardly by a resin ribbon and brushed with care the strands that still had water dripping off them. In the meantime, he had not neglected to ask the child her name, for whenever adults embark on a communication with a child, the very first thing that occurs to them is to ask their name and then immediately afterward to praise it. ‘What a beautiful name you’ve got!’ Celal beamed but Su paid hardly any attention to his comment, having now plunged into an ad-filled woman’s journal with wild hairstyles on every page. She would have remained glued to the journal for quite some time had it not been for her mother’s bloodcurdling scream.

Just as dogs approach those most scared of them or as the hair falls in the soup of the one person at a dining table who will be most disgusted by it, so the cockroach Cemal had long lost track of had decided to enter none other than Hygiene Tijen’s field of vision. The apprentice without pimples, determined to grovel to the bosses, immediately intervened. The bug was transformed under his shoe into a compressed residue of revulsion.

‘These bugs have taken over everywhere,’ Celal stammered, not knowing quite what to say next. Recently, he had been seeing creepy bugs around that he could not recognize at all. It was as if the variety of different breeds had increased along with their numbers. Some left a nasty smell when crushed. The apprentice ran to get the room spray.

‘You need not wait, Misses Tijen,’ wheedled Madam Auntie, detecting the horror that had appeared on the latter’s face. ‘Don’t worry about your daughter. We’ll come upstairs together.’

Hygiene Tijen was so desperate that she did not even wait for the offer to be repeated. In two seconds flat, she jumped over the corpse of the cockroach, left the price of the haircut on the register and reached the door. Before going out, she stopped for a brief moment to wave at the old woman with
appreciation and at her daughter with affection.

As soon as she left, the manicurist, having sat stiff as a poker for longer than she could tolerate, jumped to her feet. ‘The lady couldn’t stand it!’ she bellowed twisting her face into a sour expression. ‘I bet she couldn’t drink the coffee because she found it dirty. She must have disliked not smelling any bleach in it.’

The plump ginger-head and the blonde with the cast eye jumped into the tittle-tattle, Cemal turned up the volume of the TV when he saw the video clip he had been awaiting for days finally being broadcast, another round of tea was served to all customers, cigarettes were lit one by one and with amazing speed the beauty parlour became immersed in its usual languor. Having now gotten rid of the guilt of being obligated to look the woman who was an all-time-favourite topic of gossip in the eye, they had no difficulty in going back to where they had left off. This can be called the ‘Full-speed, full-throttle return of the repressed’. Just as nature detests emptiness, so too does the gossip-machine crave the completion of the missing pieces. The fact that there was now a child among them did not stop the gossipmongers in the beauty parlour, nor did the fact that the child belonged to the person they were lavishly criticizing behind her back. For when women start gossiping, not for the simple sake of chewing the fat, but authentically, unreservedly and with all their heart, they tend to deem either their voices inaudible or their children deaf.

As for Su, it was hard to tell if she was aware of the innuendos revolving around her mother’s persona since she kept hiding behind that gaudy journal. On the page in front of her eyes stood the picture of a woman of mixed-race, who was naked from waist up and with her very short hair spiked and coloured in different phosphorescent hues.

‘Do you like it?’ asked Celal, upset about the talks and worried about the child. ‘We can do your hair like that if you want. It would be a great hit at school.’

‘No!’ griped Su sullen-faced. ‘My hair has to be shorter than that.’

‘Come on, you don’t have to have it so short. Let it grow a bit!’ Celal objected.

Finally lifting her head from the journal, Su gave him an appraising look. An infinitesimal light furtively flickered and then faded inside the dark well of her eyes.

‘No! Then my lice won’t go away,’ she protested, almost shouting.

The jittery brunette, all her permanent-wave rollers just removed, raised an eyebrow at the blonde with the cast eye. However, realizing she had an audience only goaded Su to increase her voice.

‘The teacher called me at school. She had written a slip. “Take this, make sure your mother reads it,” she said. Then they sent me home. My mother was very upset when she read it. She said I had lice. We went into the bathroom and washed it with medicine. We went through two shampoos. “You stay here,” she said, I sat in the tub. Then she took off my clothes from the closet. She threw all of them out the window. She threw the sheets too, and my backpack, she threw that as well.’

‘We didn’t see a backpack,’ the manicurist broodingly grumbled, with the discontent of someone who right after leaving the movie theatre learns that she has missed the most significant scene of the film.

‘You probably picked them up at school. It happens all the time,’ Celal said, trying to dismiss the matter lightly.

‘I didn’t pick them up at school,’ Su shrugged her shoulders. ‘Besides, there’s no one at school with lice except me.’

The women looked at one another with meaningful smiles. It was scarcely news to them that Hygiene Tijen had adamantly sent her daughter to a high-priced school no one else could afford and, by spending all their money to this purpose, had totally wrecked not only her husband’s nerves but also the foundations of her marriage.

‘No one in the classroom has lice but me. Now it’ll spread from my head to the whole school,’ giggled the girl. There was a shadowy, blemished tinge to her laughter. It was blemished
because it was a laughter oblivious to the reactions of the people around her, originating in her alone to then flow once again back to her, not knowing where and when to stop, and perhaps only indicating a starvation for entertainment. It was shadowed because it was a laughter accelerating at full speed as Su egged herself on, getting out of control as it gained momentum, bordering silently on pain. Her laughter was inconsistent and maladjusted, totally detached from the contents of her talk. It was too unwieldy, too heavy, too much for a child her age.

‘My mother says the lice came from my father. He got it from his hookers and then when he cuddled me, I got it from him.’

As if all the windows had been simultaneously opened wide and an unbridled wind rammed in, the women lined up in front of the wide mirror shuddered from top to toe. For it is awesome to hear the most private family secrets spill from the mouth of a child, pretty much like reaping the fruits of your neighbour’s garden without actually stealing them. Though there might be a crime, there is no criminal around. Since when is it considered a crime to softly pull aside and make way for the muddy waters that will flow anyhow? Likewise, the beauty parlour populace had backed aside, becoming entirely silent so as to let the child speak fully and freely. They writhed impatiently to hear more, as much as possible, without getting involved, mixed up or messed up. Even Cemal, despite his long-established inability to stay still for more than two seconds and his tendency to poke his nose into each and every conversation around him, managed to keep utterly quiet. Only Madam Auntie felt the need to take action to end this unpleasant topic, but since she could not quite figure out what to say, all she did was to warn Celal to finish his job as quickly as possible and then shrank back into her chair to stay stock-still. Lost in her thoughts, she pulled out the pendant inside her blouse and distractedly caressed the stern face of Saint Seraphim.

Su twirled her chair around in a full circle and, as if to
determine the impact of her words, took stock of everyone’s faces. When she completed the circle and returned to her former position, her pitch black eyes met in the mirror the navy blue-grey eyes of the old woman which were glittering like a bead. As Madam Auntie delicately let out from her small, sharp nose the air she had drawn in with melancholy, she smiled with an embarrassment that contained an apology somewhere within. It was difficult to tell if she was apologizing to certain people present on behalf of the child for what she had told or, just the opposite, if she apologized to the child for the curious listeners surrounding her. Though unable to decipher the meaning of this nebulous smile, Su could not help but smile back at her.

Having now speeded up, Celal called both apprentices to his side for help. Within a few minutes, all three resumed work with apparent intensity and blow-dried the hair of both the old woman and the little girl. By having his two apprentices hold two oval mirrors to their necks, he enabled them to see how their hair looked from the back. Thus besieged with mirrors from both the front and back, the images of the child and the old woman multiplied while their similarities concomitantly increased and coalesced.

Yet when they said goodbye to Celal, who saw them off all the way to the door, and started to climb the stairs of Bonbon Palace, the age difference between them became woefully apparent. The child stopped frequently to wait for the other, sometimes descending the stairs to accompany her up. When they reached the third floor in this manner, Madam Auntie stopped to catch her breath. As Su leaned against the door standing on one leg as if she were punished, she used this opportunity to share more with her new elderly friend that she had started to relax with.

‘Three girls in the class, they nicknamed me. Those name
stickers on the notebooks, you know, they wrote “LICESU” in capital letters on mine. My real name is Bengisu, I just shorten it.’

‘You know, I too had lice when I was a little girl,’ muttered Madam Auntie, in spite of her discomfort about the girl’s laughter.

‘Really? Did they nickname you as well?’ said Su, while trying to figure out who the red-bearded, frowning ‘grandfather’ dangling from her necklace was.

‘No, they didn’t nickname me. We had a washer woman, she used to line all her children up and split their lice. She picked all my lice as well. My poor mother had a fit. She was a delicate woman, couldn’t handle such things. That was the way she was brought up. What could she do? If a rose in the garden withered, she would take to her bed with grief, if she saw a dead rat, she could not recover for days. I guess she was born in the wrong age…’

The woman’s navy blue-grey eyes became lustreless, if only for a moment. With the intuition unique to those who have long prohibited themselves from remembering specific events and mentioning certain names, she sensed she was about to enter the forbidden garden of her memory and withdrew immediately. As if sharing a secret, she teasingly winked at the child whose head appeared even smaller after her haircut.

‘Don’t pay attention to their calling you “Licesu” or anything else. Everyone gets lice as a child and not only as a child. People get lice when they grow up as well. How can you know who has lice and who does not? Can you see lice with the naked eye? Everyone claims to be clean as a whistle but believe me they too have lice somewhere in them!’