The Flea Palace (2 page)

In order not to get himself into trouble once again, he shunned the shortcuts and made his way through the winding roads, only to arrive a full hour and forty-five minutes late for his appointment at the apartment building he had been searching. Shaking off his trauma bit by bit, he parked along the sidewalk while staring suspiciously at the cluster of people blocking the entrance of the building. Having no idea why they had gathered there, but nevertheless convinced they would do him no harm, he managed to calm down and again checked the address his chatty secretary had handed to him that very morning: ‘Cabal Street, Number 88 (Bonbon Palace).’ His chatterbox of a secretary had also included a note: ‘The apartment building with the rose acacia tree in the garden.’ Wiping away the large beads of sweat on his forehead, Injustice Pureturk stared at the tree in the garden that was in bloom with mauve, reddish pink flowers. This, he thought, must be what they called ‘rose acacia’.

Still, since he did not at all trust his secretary whom he intended to replace at the next possible instance, he personally wanted to see the building’s signpost with his own shortsighted eyes. Parking the van askew, he jumped down. No sooner had he taken a step, however, than a small girl among a group of three children standing in the crowd screamed in horror: ‘The genie is here! Grandpaaa, grandpa, look, the genie is here!’ The round, greying, bearded elderly man the girl was tugging turned around and inspected first the van and then the van’s driver, each time with an equally disappointed look. Evidently dissatisfied with what he saw, he screwed up his face so that it looked even more sour and drew the three children closer to him.

Injustice was done to Injustice Pureturk. He was not a genie or anything, but just an ordinary man who possessed a disproportionate face with somewhat mammoth ears and unfortunately coloured hair. He also happened to be short.
Indeed very short: one metre and forty-three centimetres in all. Even though he had been previously taken for a dwarf, this was the first time he was accused of being a genie. Trying not to mind, he doggedly pushed his way through the group toward the ashen apartment building. He donned the thin-framed thick-lensed glasses he habitually carried, not on his nose as the doctor had recommended but inside the pocket of his work overalls. Despite the help of the glasses he still could not make out what the messy protrusion at the front of the building was until it was an inch away: a relief of a peacock with the feathers darkened with dirt. Had it been cleaned up, it might have looked appealing to the eye. Underneath the relief it read: ‘Bonbon Palace Number 88.’ He was at the right place.

A business card squeezed in-between the lined-up buzzers next to the door drew his attention. It belonged to a rival firm that had two months previously started to work in the same neighbourhood. Since the people around no longer seemed to be paying any attention to him, he took the opportunity to remove the business card and put one of his own in its stead.

Upon having these business cards printed, he had hired a university student to distribute them all around the neighbourhood, but it had not taken him long to fire the young man without pay, for doing a lousy job. That was typical of Injustice Pureturk: he never trusted anyone.

To unload the pesticide sprays he walked back to his van. Yet, the moment he had shut his door, a blond woman with a hairdresser’s smock tied around her neck reached in through the half-open window and gawked at him cross-eyed:

‘Is this van all you’ve got? Won’t be enough, I tell you,’ she hooted knitting her well-plucked eyebrows. ‘They’d promised at least two trucks. There’s so much trash, even two trucks would have a hard time.’

‘I’m not here to pick up your garbage,’ Injustice Pureturk frowned. ‘I’m here for the insects… the cockroaches…’

‘Oh,’ the woman flinched, ‘Even then, I tell you, what you’ve got won’t be enough.’

Before Injustice Pureturk could fathom what she was talking about and what exactly these people had been waiting for, two red trucks ploughed onto Cabal Street as if they had heard the call. The crowd stirred upon noticing a van from a television channel right behind the trucks. Injustice Pureturk, utterly unaware of the excitement around him, was trying at that moment to find a better spot to park. However, finding himself amidst chaos upon chaos against his will must have somewhat tattered his nerves by now, for the vein on the right side of his forehead started to thump at a crazy pace. The single movement he made to press down on the vein was more than enough to make him lose control of the steering wheel. Trying to back up in a panic, he rammed into the piles of bags slung next to the garden wall separating the apartment building from the street. All the garbage inside the bags was scattered onto the sidewalk.

If truth be told, Bonbon Palace was used to garbage, having
struggled with it for quite some time now. From early February to mid April – the period following the bankruptcy of the private company collecting the garbage in the area and preceding the resumption of service by a new one – a considerable garbage hill had collected here, bringing along with it an increasingly putrid smell. Things had not much improved with the new company either. In spite of the regular nightly collection, both the Cabal Street residents and passers-by kept throwing garbage next to the garden wall, thereby managing to collectively raise a garbage hill up anew every day.

If interested you can go there even today to see with your own eyes how, along the wall separating the apartment’s garden from the street, the garbage hill levelled by dusk rises anew the following day with no ultimate loss to its mass. Garbage bags are thrown away, garbage bags are then picked up, but despite the continual rise and fall, it is as if the garbage hill keeps perpetuating its presence. The hill comes with its own hill people – seekers who show up daily to collect pieces of tin, cardboard, leftover food and the like, as well as an army of cats and crows and seagulls. Then, of course, there are bugs; for wherever there is garbage, there are also bugs. Lice, too, have taken over in Bonbon Palace…and trust me on this, lice are the very worst…

In order to observe this one needs to spend some time there. If you have no time, however, you’ll have to make do with my version of the story. Yet I can only speak for myself. Not that I’ll foist my own views onto what transpires but I might, here and there, solder the horizontal line of truth to the vertical line of deception in order to escape the wearisome humdrum reality of where I am anchored right now. After all, I am bored stiff here. If someone brought me the good news that my life would be less dreary tomorrow, I might feel less bored today. Yet, I know too well that tomorrow will be just the same and so will all the days to follow. Nevertheless, with my fondness for circles I should not give you the impression
that it is only my life that persistently repeats itself. In the final instance, the vertical is just as faithful to its recurrence as the horizontal. Contrary to what many presume, that which is called ‘Eternal Recurrence’ is germane not only to circles but also to lines and linear arrangements.

From the monotony of lines there deviates only one path: drawing circles within circles, spiralling in and in. Such deviation resembles, in a way, being a spoilsport in the Garbage Game: not abiding by what comes up when you spin the round lid of greyish aluminum, spoiling the game by not waiting for your turn, craving to spin again and again; messing around with subjects, objects, verbs and coincidences while comforting yourself throughout: ‘In Istanbul in the spring of 2002, the death of one among us was caused by Herself–Me–Us All–None of Us.’

On Wednesday May 1st 2002, Injustice Pureturk applied pesticide dust to one of the flats of Bonbon Palace. Fifteen days later, upon returning for the baby cockroaches born from their dead mothers’ eggs, he found the door of that particular flat deadlocked. However, it is too soon to talk about these things right now. For there had been another time preceding this moment and, of course, one before that as well.

THERE WERE ONCE TWO ANCIENT CEMETERIES in this neighbourhood, one small, almost rectangular and well-kept, the other huge, semi-lunar and visibly neglected. Surrounded by ivy-covered fences and shadowy hills, leaning onto the same dishevelled wall, they had spread out over a wide terrain, jointly and continuously. Both were crowded to the brim yet deserted to the extreme. The small one belonged to the Armenians and the large one to the Muslims. On the six foot wall separating the two cemeteries, rusty nails, jagged fragments of glass and, in spite of the fear of bad luck, broken mirror pieces had been scattered upright to prevent people trespassing from one to the other. As for the two-panelled, iron-grilled, gargantuan doors of each cemetery, they were located exactly on opposite ends, one facing north and the other south so that if a visitor perchance harboured any inclination to cross from one to the other, he would be discouraged by the length of the road he would have to walk. Just the same, no one actually had to put up with such an inconvenience since there had never been a visitor with a relative buried in one cemetery who wished, once there, to pay a visit to the other cemetery as well. Be that as it may, there was many a being that hopped and jumped from one cemetery to the other as they pleased, be it night or day: the wind and thieves, for instance, or the cats and lizards. They had all mastered the many ways of going through, over and under the barrier separating the two cemeteries.

That would not last long. An incessant wave of migrations
cluttered up the city with buildings marshalled in tandem like the soldiers of a sinister army, each and every one looking much alike from a distance. Amidst the muddled waters of ‘citification’ surrounding them in all directions, the cemeteries remained intact like two uninhabited islands. As new high-rises and rows of houses were built continuously, around them up popped small, sporadic, circumscribed streets resembling from far above the veins of a brain. Streets cut in front of houses and houses blocked streets; the whole neighbourhood swelled, bloating like a foolhardy fish unable to feel satiated even when beyond being full. Finally when just about to burst, it became inevitable that an incision must be made and an opening created on the stretched tight node so as to relieve the pressure mounting from within. That incision in turn meant a new road had to be built before too long.

Due to this unforeseen, unstoppable growth, all the streets in the vicinity had become wedged at the edges like water with nowhere to go. An avenue, by linking them all into a single channel, could make them re-flow.

Yet, when the time came for the authorities to take a birds’ eye view to decide where and how to build this avenue, they realized an onerous quandary awaited them. At all the possible sites where such an avenue could be constructed, there was, as if by design, either a government building or the property of the local gentry and if not those, the jam-packed low-income shanty-houses that could be effortlessly taken down one by one but were not that easy to erase when there were so many. In order to be able to build the road that would open the way, they would first have to open the way for a road.

Istanbul being a city where houses were not built in accordance with road plans but road plans made so as not to upset the location of the houses, the construction of the new road required tearing down as few houses as possible. Given this precondition there remained only one option: making the road pass through the hilly terrain of the two cemeteries.

Once the reports detailing this plan had been approved by
the authorities, it was decided that within two and a half months the two cemeteries should be removed and the hilly terrain flattened out. Those who had loved ones in these cemeteries need not worry, they said. After all, the tombs could be moved in their entirety to various spots around the city. Muslim tombs could be transported to the slopes overlooking the Golden Horn, for instance, and the non-Muslims to their own graveyards in various other quarters.

Most of the tombs were so ancient that along with their occupants, their descendants had also changed worlds by now. There were also those that, despite having descendants still above the ground, might yet go unclaimed. In spite of all this, the number of people snooping into the fate of the tombs turned out to be far more than the authorities had initially expected. Among them, some relatives simply wanted their dead to be left alone while others discovered the proposed alternate graveyards were already crammed full. Both of these groups had instantly started to search for ways to reverse the decision. Still, the majority of the relatives acquiesced to do whatever was deemed necessary and to this end set off to shoulder the burden.

In the following days the Muslim cemetery played host at all hours of the day to all kinds of visitors, each singing a different tune. The task of hiding the traces of the nocturnal visitors from those paying homage in the daytime fell upon the cemetery guards who at dawn gathered the spilled bones and closed over the tombs dug up during the night. Then, towards noon, the authorities showed up to inspect the guards, and in the afternoon, families worried about their dead getting mixed up with other people’s dropped-by in large crowds, all the while talking and complaining, if not to the tombstones, to one another.

Until the cemetery was officially forbidden to accept visitors, the old and middle-aged women of these families were there almost every single day. When tired of standing up, they would line up with their blankets spread right there around
their relatives’ tombs. Once seated, they would either weep alone or pray together, clutching their children tightly to force them into reverential silence. Then time would drift by, the air getting heavier, some children would fall asleep while others escaped to play; and a cloud of languor would daintily follow, forming a canopy over the women on the ground. ‘The descent of the spiritual,’ this can be called. After all, even the most otherworldly cannot remain oblivious to the forces of gravity pulling them down to earth. In this state the women would make it through to the night. Rooting about in their long tattered bags, bought who knows when and mutated over time into the same grimy tone of brown, they would fish out aniseed crackers, pour tea from thermoses while at the same time circulating lemon cologne to wipe both their sweaty faces and the reddish skin marks around their knees left by knee-high nylon socks that, no matter which size you chose, were always too tight. Next they would peruse the pages of the notebooks of the past, recalling one by one the names of all those who had made life living-hell for the dearly departed. Once they started to hammer out past controversies, it would not take them long to abandon the mourning of the dead and switch instead to gossiping about the living. All tea gone and only a handful of aniseeds left from the crackers, one among them would remind the others of how the dearly departed, as if not having suffered enough on earth, were now denied peace even deep down under the ground. With that reminder, the gloom of the setting would engulf the cloud of languor. ‘The ascent of the material,’ this can be called. After all, even the most worldly cannot remain indifferent to the celestial. Thus, these old and middle-aged women would step by step wander off from prayers to curses, from curses to gossip, only to retread to the beginning to wrap up this undulating conversation in a final prayer.