The Flea Palace (7 page)

However, it was only much later, with the start of another World War that his luck fully took a turn for the better. From black-marketeering during the war, he acquired a considerable fortune and an abscessed standing in society. Like a rubber ball he succeeded in bouncing his way through the ruins of war, at times even conducting business with the Germans. It did not matter to him at all. The war that raged on was not his. He no longer believed in
the victory of states or of causes but only in the victory of individuals. And the face of victory, however attained, was always turned to the past. Triumph in life did not mean reaching step by step a future too good to pine for, but rather restoring an unfulfilled past to its former freshness.

That is what he did. He acquired a new woman instead of the one who no longer fulfilled her wifely functions, a new baby for the one he had lost and a new authority to replace the one wrested away from him. All, yet none of them were new. When he held in his arms the baby the young Frenchwoman he lived with had born him, he was exactly fifty-nine years old. Like his first baby, this too was a girl with ash-coloured eyes. He hid this from Agripina for years. Had he not done so, however, it was unlikely that she would have minded, let alone have been jealous. If one went by what was written by the chief physician who treated her, she was utterly indifferent to everything around her. Exhibiting no sign of recovery she passed her entire time painting black and white watercolours of the peasants whom she watched at work in the vineyards on the northern slope of the clinic’s grounds. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov read these letters with great care, concern and sorrow to then forget about them once they were stored in his drawer. Content with his new relationship he seemed determined to bestow upon his second baby all the love he could not give the first one. Still, never did he attempt to get divorced from his wife. Though long ago having given up visiting her, he was always careful to keep Agripina within easy reach. His wife had at first been his little lover, most steadfast admirer, then the victim of his weaknesses and infirmities, and eventually the only mirror that reflected all that he had lost on route to where he had arrived; she had been the closest witness of his personal history. Neither a partner, nor a friend, but perhaps a logbook… And just as a logbook would not know what was written inside, Agripina too was unaware of what it was exactly that she had been a witness of. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov decided to keep this precious memento in a safe place until it was time to go and pick it up.

Yet when that time came, Pavel Pavlovich Antipov had lived so long and had become so old that he had started to carry his age like a dilapidated outfit worn over and over throughout the years, so comfortable that it could still be worn again and again were it not for the embarrassment of being seen in it by other people. All his goals he had actualized one by one, he had recovered all he had lost and lived as long as he had hoped. Yet still, even though life was done with him, it did not come to an end. There was not a single person around him who had lived that long. As all those people so much younger than him that he had loved, protected, fought or hated, departed one by one, his torment at the death of each was deposited on his chest layer upon layer, throbbing at night with a sharp, piercing pain. He could not help suspecting that the relatives of the deceased, even his own woman and daughter, blamed him deep down, that everyone hated him for living so long in such a damned age when not only life but even death had lost its enchantment. Though ninety-four years old, not only had he not aged, let alone become senile, he had barely even grown old. There was nothing he could do about it. The only way he could make up for his fault was through death but one did not die on demand and he did not demand to die either.

At times, he blamed himself through the persona of the flabby-chinned Levantine who had been his boss for a total of three days, but whose castrated voice he still, after all these years, could not forget: ‘How old are you Monsieur Antipov? So almost a century! Within this century, states fell like a house of cards, people were wiped out like flies, the Trumpet of Israfil
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grated on our ears not only once, but at least a dozen times. But what about you, did you erroneously go through the gates opening up to a time beyond time or did you knowingly make a pact with the devil? How much longer do you intend to live Monsieur Antipov? Could it be that you leaving your country to escape death’s clutches, to now wait
here in this country of others for death to come and take you, is another one of Fortuna’s tricks?’

Just when the agony brought by his incurable fault had started to make Pavel Pavlovich Antipov grow more and more distant from people, he received a letter from the chief physician: Agripina had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. One morning, under the startled looks of the patients, nurses and physicians, she had suddenly ran screaming outside and tried to talk one by one to the peasants at the vineyard but, upon realizing that none of them understood a word she said, had suffered a nervous breakdown. When brought back inside and having been somewhat calmed down with the help of tranquilizers, she had spilled out her unintelligible words to those at the clinic. Noticing how scared the other patients were, she had become scared herself and had withdrawn. The head physician wanted Monsieur Antipov to come at once to see his wife because as far as he could tell, the foreign language that his most silent and most easygoing patient had started to speak after all these years – without the presence of a single event that would have triggered such a transformation – was Russian.

When Agripina Fyodorovna Antipov saw Pavel Pavlovich Antipov, she embraced him with a contentment brought on less by seeing her husband after all these years, than by finding someone who could understand her. Then she started to talk. Her words had neither meaning nor coherence. She blubbered about the songs the peasants at the vineyards sang at sunset. Then she complained about the childish jealousies of the elderly patients at the clinic and also about God’s callousness. She did not stop. That day in a monotonous voice, neither raised nor lowered but eventually hoarse, without the slightest indication of happiness or sorrow, she kept switching topics all the while mentioning a kitchen with smells of cinnamon and whipped cream. As the night drew closer and
her exceedingly patient audience-of-one got ready to leave, she asked him with a hurt smile when he would come again, but sunk without awaiting his response into the sticky, obligatory slumber of medication.

The taciturn visitor returned the following day; this time with a single rose in his hand and a box under his arm. Agripina did not pay any attention to the rose, but upon taking the fancy wrapping off the box, she greeted with exuberant happiness the bonbons glittering on the round varnished tray. This lovely tray that Pavel Pavlovich Antipov had bought from a canny antique dealer included a study by Vishniakov. It depicted the scene of a boyar abducting the woman he loved from her father’s house. The boyar had stopped just before going down the last few steps of the wooden ladder, using one arm to hold with superhuman strength his loved one on his lap, and grabbing onto the ladder with the other, while gazing at the half-shady half-green forest they were about to disappear into. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov withdrew to the side to watch the reaction this tray would create on his wife. One of the physicians he had consulted on his way over had stated that memory occasionally played vindictive tricks; the brain rewound when the body was nearing the end. Many patients, upon reaching a particular, often the very last stage of their lives, returned to their childhoods and to their mother tongue. Even a single object or a dream was sufficient to trigger such a transformation. Watching his wife Pavel Pavlovich Antipov wondered if the logbook was now turning the pages backwards to erase line by line all that was written within.

Yet Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova looked much more interested in the bonbons than the Vishniakov tray. Unaware of her husband’s worries, she randomly picked one, held it out with a grateful smile and asked what flavour it was. ‘Since it is pink, it must be strawberry,’ was the response she got. Pink! It had been so long since she had last seen pink. She took the wrapper off and threw the candy into her mouth. The colour pink had a nice smell and a syrupy flavour.

As the bonbon melted in her mouth, first the anxiety-stricken lips of the beautiful lover in the boyar’s lap, then everything around that was coloured in pink started to come to life. Agripina immediately reached for the other bonbons asking her husband the flavour each time. The yellow ones were lemon, reds cinnamon; greens were mint, oranges tangerine; browns caramel and the beige ones vanilla. Then she tasted them. Yellow was a sour colour, red sharp; green scorched, orange tangy; brown was astringent and beige puckered. With each new bonbon she tasted, the colours Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova had left in Istanbul returned to her. She watched as her bed against the wall, the chair and desk in front of the window, the cherry tree side table with all sorts of medicine on top, the Virgin Mary icon and the august face of Saint Seraphim swinging from her necklace revealed themselves. She ran to the windows in bewilderment only to be taken aback by the scenery that greeted her. All the colours were in place. Burnt was the colour of the vineyards extending from the slope of the hill into the horizon, tar the dresses of the peasant women singing as they filled their large baskets with thick skinned grapes, sharp the trees that sheltered shrill swallows and sour the sun in the sky. Colours were everywhere, but not as many were inside as outside. An idea occurred to her just then. She went back and collected the myriad of wrappers of the bonbons she had eaten. Through these spectacles she looked at the clinic where so many years of her life had been spent. As she put down one wrapper and picked up another, the dreary whiteness of the cold stone building’s halls, the walls of the rooms, physicians’ uniforms, the pale faces of the nurses adorned with reserved smiles, the pills she had to swallow twice a day, the bed sheets changed by the maids every other day and those tasteless soups placed in front of her; all of these things were suddenly dyed in their own colours – as was the man standing across from her. The only thing that did not change was the fretful look on his face.

Agripina did not stop. Not only did she not stop, she placed
the wrappers on top of one another creating new hues. After a few attempts she placed red on top of blue and witnessed the whole world turn purple. A wheezing cry escaped her lips: ‘Is-tan-bul!’ She had found it. She had found the colour that had escaped her on the deck of that rotten, reeking boat where she had stood at the age of nineteen with a small swelling in her womb and a larger one on her back. In the spectrum of colours and hues, Istanbul was purple; a greyish-bluish purple the eye-dazzling sun reflecting from the lead-plated domes blotted drop-by-drop and scorched strike-by-strike. She remembered that accursed mixture of yellow and purple. Over and over, again and again, she heaved in gasps: ‘Istanbul!’ It was as if she were not repeating the same name hundreds of times, but pronouncing one single, lengthy name of unchanging syllables. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov could not bear it any longer; taking his wife’s hands into his, ‘Agripina,’ he muttered, ‘Did you remember Istanbul?’

In the following days, Agripina fantasized two things about herself: first, that she was young, and second, that she was in Istanbul. Occasionally Turkish words spilled from her lips. Her palms were sweaty all the time; her reason came and left. Every time it left her, she found herself in Istanbul, and when it returned she would have left yet another piece of her mind back there. There was no noticeable improvement in her condition. Every passing day not only steadfastly replicated the previous day but also hinted that there would soon be no more repetitions.

She should not die like this, with such an untimely departure leaving behind the unbearable burden of her absence. On the morning of a troubled night, Pavel Pavlovich Antipov came to the clinic. ‘Agripina,’ he asked, ‘Would you like us to go to Istanbul once again?’ When he saw her blushing smile, as if she had heard something obscene, he ruled it to be a hidden ‘yes’. He felt that he should do such a thing so that his wife’s death, even if it were to occur before its time and much before his own, would at least be more dignified than the life she had so
far led. To this end, in spite of all the delay, he had to provide her with the opportunity to avenge the pain of those earlier days, by returning years later to the city where at such a young age she had been so scorned, trampled, belittled and defeated. He wanted to make sure this incomplete and stumpy tale would be completed in peace; while he spread out in front of her the pleasures she had once been deprived of, the luxuries she had not tasted, and the bliss she had not felt. He had made up his mind. Agripina should spend the rest of her life not at this clinic but in Istanbul, only this time not as a refugee or deportee or stranger or guest or tenant. She should not be in the others’ Istanbul but her own. To make her a home there, he would first make her a homeowner.

Thus they arrived. They arrived but at first glance neither the city could recognize them nor they the city. Having no desire to spend a day more than necessary in hotel rooms, Pavel Pavlovich Antipov started immediately to search for a suitable house. He did not yet know if the local laws permitted foreigners to acquire property or not. However, given that there were so many people in the world willing to tamper with the gage of their nature for personal benefit or illicit gain, he did not have the slightest doubt that he would somehow find a way. Nonetheless, the opportunity that presented itself within ten days was more than he could wish for. By chance a usurer they sat next to during a dinner reception, hosted by the owners of their hotel, mentioned how the construction of an apartment building in an exclusive neighbourhood of the city had recently been halted midway due to the unexpected bankruptcy of the owner. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov did not miss this opportunity that had come his way.