The Flea Palace (10 page)

Yet there was one person who had from the very beginning had her hair done exclusively by Celal – someone who relished the silence that had just descended in the salon as much as he did: Madame Auntie. This tiny, elderly woman living alone on the top floor of Bonbon Palace at Flat Number 10 came once every two weeks without fail to have her thin, sparse hair trimmed and, once a month, coloured platinum yellow. That specific colour, however, had become a source of worry to the hearts and a balm to the tongues of the regular customers of the beauty parlour. They thought she was too old for platinum yellow or else platinum yellow was too much for her age. She was seventy-eight years old, certainly an inappropriate age to be a blonde. Given that she still chose to be blonde, it was considered that she should at least wipe off that serious look, not be so grave or such a model of dignity. If she was instead a witty, at least a little goofy, garrulous and cheerful old woman with eyes twinkling the traces of the bohemian life she had once led, paying no heed to moral prohibitions or to what anyone said, then her hair would have been appropriate. Yet here she was, as far removed from being ‘a slacker’ as a proper granny, as straight as if she had been drawn by a ruler, as heavy as cast metal, and, to top it all, platinum blonde. That was simply too much for the regular customers of the beauty parlour.

It was too much because, in the coded world of colours and hair colours, the rules are clear-cut. Yellow has little to do with respectability. A blonde woman can pierce through this rule on only one condition: if she is a genuine blonde! Originality is a problem peculiar to blondes. The brunettes, red heads and albinos can have their hair coloured as often as they like and in as many different shades as they please and yet never have to encounter fifty times a day the question as to whether this is indeed their natural colour. The desire to be blonde makes women predisposed to be sly and forces them to lie. Yet their attempts at fraud are foiled very quickly. While they are busy convincing people, truth insidiously grins from their roots. Blondness makes the enthusiast dishonest and the genuine anti-social.

Yet neither her hair colour nor her wearing make-up at this age weakened the respect Madame Auntie awakened in those around her. It was evident from the first day that she, with her solemnity and taciturn nature, would be Celal’s customer and always remain so. If judged by the gleam in their eyes upon seeing each other, they got along fabulously yet, given they rarely opened their mouths to utter a few words, it was hard to figure out how they had bonded. If it were up to them, words should have been rationed to people every month. Everyone should have known that words uttered are like drinking water and tilled soil, a scarce resource, and whenever one spoke, they depleted their limited share.

However, this afternoon the tranquility of this silence-loving pair could only last four minutes. Suddenly, the door was pushed, the bell jolted. In accompaniment to the watermelon vendor’s mechanical voice, which made him sound as if he was firing orders, a young woman entered the beauty parlour with quick yet unhurried steps. Three indolent women, all Cemal’s customers, all with leopard-patterned plastic smocks tied to their necks and lined up next to one another on the swivelling chairs in front of the wall-length mirror, turned their heads with all the rollers, hairpins, hair
caps and aluminum folios to give the newcomer a once over, looking from top to bottom. Upon realizing who she was, with a deeper curiosity, they eyed her up again, this time looking from bottom to top. This was a historic moment, for up until now the Blue Mistress had never set foot in the beauty parlour.

Celal stole a look at the door and went back to work. At that moment, he was interested in no hair other than the platinum yellow strands of his friend; whoever this young woman might be, she did not look like his type of customer anyhow. Cemal, however, was neither as indifferent nor as ignorant as his twin. On the contrary, from the gossip lavishly dispensed at the beauty parlour from morning until dark, he had distilled ample information about the Blue Mistress. He knew, for instance, that she was only twenty-two years old. He had also heard how a couple of weeks ago, upon being harassed by a man at the entrance to their street, she had poured all the contents of the garbage bag she had taken out to dump over the head of her assailant. Furthermore, he was also informed that she had picked a fight with the exceedingly religious apartment manager, Hadji Hadji, who, when dividing the apartment’s joint water bill among all the flats according to the number of people residing in each unit, had prepared her invoice for not one but two persons, It was scarcely news to anyone that although the Blue Mistress had leased Flat Number 8 by herself stating she would live alone, a sour-faced, olive oil merchant old enough to be her father lived with her at least four days a week. Cemal knew all this and was dying to find out more.

Turning over his highlighting brush to the pimpled apprentice, as he veered toward the door with a stuck-up smile on his face, he took a full-length shot of the unexpected visitor. You could hardly say that her body was great; though not quite a pear, it was still pear-like. She was wearing a long gauzy dress with straps that covered up too much for a mistress. However, under the sunlight trickling through the glass door, her legs were entirely visible as she had not worn an
underskirt. It looked as if she simultaneously wanted to hide and expose her body; or perhaps she was just confused…and her face… her face was the most interesting part. Some people’s faces are like magnets covered with skin. All the ins and outs, ups and downs, core and gist of their personality reside there. They think with their faces; converse, promenade, quarrel, get hungry, feel happy, love or make love with their faces. Their bodies are necessary, albeit unimpressive pedestals, merely added on to carry their faces. Such people are essentially walking faces. Accordingly, they can never hide their feelings away. Whatever they feel gets reflected, totally and immediately, upon their faces. The petite, pale face of the Blue Mistress, adorned with an azure
hizma
, screamed out that, right at that moment, she was trying hard not to show her distress. Cemal took a step toward her and though this was not at all his habit, shook hands with the Blue Mistress, flagrantly violating women’s hairdressers’ custom of greeting customers. Like all repressed homosexuals who generally got along well with the delicate sex but also somewhat sneered at them, he too was particularly interested in those women who are partly envied, partly hated by other women.

Trying to ignore the inquisitive, impish stares directed at her from different angles of the beauty parlour, the Blue Mistress moved with brisk, uncertain steps toward the swivel chair Cemal pointed out to her. As she took her place in front of the long, wide mirror with other women, the looks directed at her folded into one another and multiplied. The blonde with a slight cast in her eye, the jittery chain-smoking brunette who kept shaking her pedicured toes with cotton pieces stuck in between each one, the short and plump gingerhead sitting with two thick carroty lines on top of her eyes having her eyebrows coloured along with her hair, and finally the elf-like elderly lady at the very corner; all stared at her as if waiting to be introduced.

The pimpled apprentice tied the leopard-patterned, plastic smock with dubious stains onto the neck of the Blue Mistress,
careful to touch her as little as possible. It was an agonizing misfortune for the apprentice to have to work at a beauty parlour at this sensitive stage of his life, hearing all sorts of obscene jokes from women about the way his face divulged the sins his hand must be committing at nights. As the teenage boy backed off with unsteady steps, he did not notice the cat that had without a sound snuck in through the open window. All eyes were turned toward the animal when it let out a mighty ‘meow’ upon having its tail trampled.

It was a thick-coated, grim-faced, strapping cat as black as tar: one of those that looked upon every human they saw with narrowed eyes as if there had been a bloody fight between cats and humans from time immemorial. Still, as the round strand of hair starting from the sides of its nose down under its chin looked as if someone had dipped it in a bowl of yogurt, it had a cute side in spite of everything.

‘Come, Garbage! Come here, you nuisance!’ Cemal called out when he realized that the Blue Mistress was fond of the cat.

‘Why do you call the cat “Garbage”?’ asked the Blue Mistress. The animal had immediately sensed who to get attention from and started rubbing against her feet. The Blue Mistress grabbed it with her two hands and lifted it up, directing the same question this time to the cat in the sugary syrupy voice women use when admiring babies: ‘Why do they call you Garbage? Tell me why, my beauty? How could one call such a beautiful cat Garbage?’

‘Perhaps because this Mister Garbage never leaves the garbage dump,’ Cemal remarked with joy. Now that Garbage provided a means for him to communicate with the Blue Mistress, it seemed cuter to Cemal than ever. ‘There is probably no other street cat in all of Istanbul as fortunate as this one. Not that he has an outstanding beauty, look at his face for God’s sake. Have you ever seen a cat with such dirty looks? It is as if he was going to be a snake but could not find the appropriate skin. But he still finds a way to get people to like him. Does he have an irresistible charm or what? How does he
manage to wrangle food out of whomever he visits? But do you think he’ll be satisfied? Never! He eats his fill and then ends up in his kingdom: the garbage dump. I swear I would not have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. We had just rented this place, were in the middle of the final preparations, dog-tired from working all day long and hungry like wolves. We decided to order food from the chicken place. You know how huge their portions are, don’t you? Rice, salad, fried potatoes, all come heaped high. Well, let me cut to the chase. There was some mix-up and they had sent an extra chicken. We didn’t return it as we thought we could eat that one as well. Of course, we couldn’t. Everyone could barely finish what they had in front of them. Especially Celal, he pecked at it like a bird. As we were eating, guess who picked up the scent and showed up? I didn’t know then that they called him “Garbage”, but along he comes, begging food so desperately you’d think the poor thing had been starving for days. So we put the extra chicken in front of him and may the curse of God befall me if I’m lying, he gobbled that chicken down so ferociously you’d think a pack of Dobermans were chasing him. Not a single bone was left behind. Can you imagine, he devoured a plate of chicken heaped full right in front of our eyes. Back then the “Cat Prophet” lived in Flat Number 2. Had you heard of him? Another nut! He had some twenty, thirty cats. The whole place smelt of cat piss. Still, even that was better than the stink of this garbage. We were talking about that before you arrived. I was just saying to Celal, we live in so much garbage, we’ll soon start to peck like roosters. Right, Celal?’

Celal shook his head in agreement.

‘After all that he had wolfed down, this Mister Garbage here went after the cat food of the Cat Prophet, but her tribe must have given him a sound beating for he returned with his tail between his legs for our leftovers. We put out the fried potatoes which he pretended not to like much but he finished them off all the same. At that point we all stopped working to
watch the animal; we placed bets on when he was going to explode.’

Not only the women lined-up by the mirror but also the manicurist and the apprentices who had heard this story at least forty times were all ears listening to Cemal. He may not have been as fine a hairdresser as his brother, but when it came to garrulousness, he beat everyone hands down. His linguistic aptitude was amazing. If he were picked up from here and dropped off in a country he could not even place on a map, he would learn their language in a flash just to be able to understand what was being spoken around him and then put in his two cents’ worth. Likewise, in just five years he had been able to repair his Turkish, which had lost its lustre during the long years he spent in Australia and had polished it brand new. The only problem was his telltale accent. However, Celal was not certain as to whether his three and a half minutes younger brother actually failed to get rid of his accent or deliberately kept it intact thinking the customers liked it more this way.

‘He ate and ate, then got up stretching. The animal had turned into a giant stomach! He couldn’t even walk, dragging along that tummy. We dashed after him, following him outside where he jumped on the wall of this side garden…and what a jump! He had become so heavy that his belly got caught and he almost fell down. We thought he would curl up somewhere and sleep for at least two days. No way! Instead he leaped to the other side of the wall. You know those garbage bags they leave there? Alas, we live in a garbage dump! Anyway this one had found a bunch of fish heads. I honestly have no idea what else he could have eaten that day. We felt sick as we watched him, you know. I swear I have been frightened of this cat ever since that day. We’ve heard a lot about cats who eat their owners when hungry but this Garbage here, he could gobble all of us down even when full. What’s more, I bet he would polish it all off with what he finds in the garbage!’

‘I swear he’s understood all we’ve been saying about him,’ exclaimed the plump gingerhead with a frozen face, afraid of
getting wrinkles on her forehead if she laughed.

‘Let him understand. Is it all lies? He has a trash can instead of a stomach! Hence the name: Garbage!’ grumbled Cemal as he shook the hairdryer in his hand towards the cat carefully watching him behind narrowed eyes.

The hairdryer! Knowing that being subjected to the breath of this howling monster was worse than falling into a bucket full of water, the cat took off in a blink from the lap of the Blue Mistress and leapt onto the open window. After staying there for an instant to give those in the beauty parlour a final and unhappy once-over, he jumped towards the nearest empty space like a stuffed toy filled with swagger instead of stuffing. However, before his paws reached the garden, something weird landed on his head: a cerulean child’s dress, adorned with many tiny mermaid figures ruffled all around and a starched collar, which descended like a dry leaf or a piece of paper with an almost surreal slowness from the top floor of Bonbon Palace, for approximately five seconds, landing just moments away from the soil right on top of the cat who had cut across its path. Both landed on the ground at the same time.