The Flea Palace (26 page)

‘Love is nothing but neurochemical machinery,’ Professor Kandinsky used to contend. ‘And the most faithful lovers are simply bird-brained. If you meet a woman who’s been married for years, still head-over-heels in love with her husband, be assured that her memory works like that of a titmouse.’

According to Professor Kandinsky, for love to be immortal, memory needed to be mortal. In point of fact memory had to be fully capable of incessantly dying and reviving just like day and night, spring and fall, or like the neurons in the hypothalamus of those teeny-weeny titmice. These birds with their simple brains and with bodies just as frail had to remember each year a bulk of indispensable information, including where they had hidden their eggs, how to survive the winter chill, where to find food. As their memories were not large enough to shelter so many crumbs of information, rather than trying to stockpile every experience by heaping up all items of knowledge on top of one another, every fall they performed a seasonal cleansing in the cavities of their brains. Hence they owed their ability to survive under such convoluted conditions, not to adamantly clinging on to one fixed memory, but rather to destroying their former memories to create fresh new ones. As for matrimony, there too, just like in nature, being able to do the same things for years on end was only possible if one retained the ability to forget having being doing the same things for years on end. That’s why, while those with weak memories and messy records were able to bandage much more easily the wounds inflicted throughout the history
of their affair, those who constantly and fixedly thought about the good old days and yearned for the wo/men they married were bound to have a tough time in coming to grips with the fact that ‘today’ would not be like ‘yesterday’. The miraculous formula of love was to have a mortal memory, one that dithered and wavered incessantly.

Yet, that day standing by the door with two cups of
ashure
in her hands, HisWifeNadia had not been able to thwart a particular scrap of information long forgotten in its return to her consciousness. She had remembered. As she stood there watching her husband flirt with another woman, she had recalled how doting he had once been toward her as well, that is, what a different man he once was. Even worse than remembering this, was the observation that his tenderness was in fact not a thing of the past and that he could still behave courteously. He was perfectly capable of acting, if not becoming, altered. If Professor Kandinsky were here, he would have probably found the incident too preposterous to bother with. The aptitude to renew memory by erasing previously stored knowledge was a merit germane to the tiny titmice, not to unhappily married women.

HisWifeNadia had then taken a step inside, her gaze irresolutely wandering, if only for a minute, over the lovers still unaware of her, still reading fortune in a coffee cup giggling and cooing. As she gaped, first at both of them and then the woman alone, she had found herself immersed in a scientifically dubious contention which was once of profound concern to her: ‘If and when you look attentively at someone unable to see you, unaware of your presence, be assured that she will soon feel uneasy and abruptly turn around to see her seer.’

However, before the other woman had a chance to do so, it was Metin Chetinceviz who would notice HisWifeNadia standing there. With visible panic he had jumped to his feet. Struggling hard to adjust his gleefully relaxed body to this brusque shift, he had hobbled a few steps only to make it as far as the centre of the room, where he had come to a full stop. In
an attempt to make his body a
portiere
drawn in between the two women, he had stood there wriggling for a moment, not knowing which side to turn to. Not only his mind but his face too had bifurcated as he struggled to simultaneously give a cajoling smile to his lover, whom he had always treated gently, and frown at his wife, whom he was used to treating coarsely. Unable to cling on to this dual mission any longer, he had grabbed his stinking amber briefcase, along with his wife’s hand and hustled both outside. Their quarrel that night had been no shoddier than the ones before, except that it had lasted longer. HisWifeNadia had hitherto been afraid at various instances that her husband might kill her, but now for the first time she had felt she too could kill him. Oddly enough, this gruesome feeling had not seemed that gruesome at all.

What
was
truly gruesome for HisWifeNadia was to know nothing about this other woman. Since she had no acquaintances among Metin Chetinceviz’s colleagues, getting this precious information would be more arduous than she thought. Startlingly, she could not even describe her to anyone for however hard she tried, the woman’s face remained hazy in her memory. Still not giving up, she had made oodles of plans each more complex than the previous one, and kept calling the studio with new excuses under different names each time. When unable to attain anything like that, she had started going to the studio every day, wasting four hours on the road, just to patrol around the building. She sure knew that her husband would break her legs if he ever spotted her around here but even this dire peril had not urged her to give up.

‘The gravest damage psychopharmacology has wrought on humanity is its obsession with cleansing the brain from its quirks.’

According to Professor Kandinsky, the human brain functioned like a possessive housewife priding herself on her fastidiousness. Whatever stepped inside its house, it instantly seized, remarkably vigilant of preserving her order. That, however, was no easy task since, like many such possessive
housewives, so too did the brain have several unruly, cranky kids, each of whom were baptized under the name of a distinct mental defect. Whenever any one of these kids started to crawl around, sprinkling crumbs and creating a mess all over the house, the brain would crack up with apprehension, worrying about the disruption of her order. It was precisely at this point that psychopharmacology stepped into the stage. To solve the quandary it tried to stop the toddling child and, when that failed, it took the child by the ear and dragged him outside: ‘If you wish to control uncontrollable movements, stop movement altogether! In order to prevent the damage thoughts might generate, bring your patient to a state where he won’t think anymore.’ Hundreds of drugs and dozens of practices aimed repetitively at this result. The world of medicine, notorious for deeming the physician who invented lobotomy worthy of a Nobel, muffled ear-piercing screams into an absolute silence, and favoured death over life by taking from the brain’s hands the boisterous children whom she indeed found troublesome but held dear nevertheless. According to Professor Kandinsky, there was infinite gain in acknowledging straight out that one could never entirely get rid of his obsessions and all attempts to the contrary were bound to cause far more damage than good. There was nothing wrong in entering into the brain’s home and playing according to her rules, as long as the movement inside was not curbed and what was hers was not appropriated from her.

True, the brain could not tolerate seeing her order being upset. Nonetheless, since there was more than one room in her house and more than one memory within her memory, she could certainly confuse what she put where. The interior was like a multi-drawered nightstand. In the top drawer were the undergarments, in the drawer below the folded towels and the laundered bed sheets under that. In this scheme, wherein the place of every obsession and each mania was pre-determined, one should not strive to fully get rid of a fixation somehow acquired. One could, with the aid of science or deliberate
absentmindedness, take something out of its drawer and place it in the one above. After all, the fastidious housewife the brain was, it would certainly search for a towel in the fourth drawer, and not in the fifth one where the undergarments were. ‘Carefully fold the towels you took out from the front lobe and then leave them in the subcortical centre. Do not ever attempt to wipe out your obsessions for it is not possible. Rather, suffice to put them at a place where you cannot find them. Let them stay in the wrong drawer. You will soon forget. Until your brain accidentally finds them again one day while searching something else…’

Though she was well aware of making her professor’s bones shudder in his grave, HisWifeNadia had still refused to take her obsession from its corresponding drawer and put it somewhere else. In the following days, she had made frequent calls to the studio her husband worked in, keeping it under surveillance for hours on end. Finally, one day a voice she had not heard before but recognized instantly, intuitively, answered the phone. It was her. ‘Hello, how can I help you?’ she had asked graciously. ‘Who is this?!’ HisWifeNadia had exclaimed in a voice devoid of fury but blatantly shrill. So harshly and snappily had the question been posed that the other, taken unaware, had immediately told her name. Often, identity resembles a reflex – becoming some sort of an involuntary reaction to a stimulus. That must be why, when asked to identify themselves, quite a number of people end up involuntarily introducing themselves rather than asking back, ‘Who the hell are
you
?’

Upon hearing the name pronounced, HisWifeNadia had hung up on her. Once having learned the name and workplace of her competitor, it had been painless to discover the rest. Before long she was holding two bunches of information about the woman whose details she now had in her possession. First of all, just like Metin Chetinceviz, she did voiceovers on TV. Secondly, she currently did the voiceover for the leading character in a soap opera titled ‘The Oleander of Passion’.

On the following day, before the news was broadcast, HisWifeNadia had sat down in the divan with burgundy patterns on a mauve background – the reupholstering of which she constantly put off – and watched in complete calmness an episode of ‘The Oleander of Passion’. When it was over, she decided that she simply loathed it. The plot was so absurd and the dialogues so jumbled that even the actors seemed to be suffering. Nonetheless, the next day and at the same time, there she was once again in front of the TV. Ever since then, with every passing day and every concluding episode, her commitment, if not immersion, had escalated. Academics researching housewives’ addiction to soap operas tend to overlook this, but there can be a variety of reasons for becoming a viewer, some of which are not at all palpable. Before she knew it, HisWifeNadia had become a regular viewer of ‘The Oleander of Passion’. Soon the soap opera occupied such a prominent place in her daily life that she could barely endure the weekends when it was not broadcast. She hardly questioned her fixation and barely attempted to overcome it. She solely and simply watched, just like that…and months later, as she sat there watching the eighty-seventh episode, she could not help the voice and image of Loretta jumble in her brain.

Though ‘satisfactory failure’ was an oxymoron, there could still be unsatisfactory successes in life. Professor Kandinsky was fond of saying he was both ‘unsatisfied’ and ‘successful’; which was better off than many others, he would add, especially those who were both satisfied and successful: for that specific condition was germane to either the dim-witted or the exceptionally lucky. As excess luck ultimately stupefied, the end result was the same. Nevertheless, toward the end of his life, the professor too had tasted a breakdown. Both the dissatisfaction and the failure grabbing him stemmed from the same cause: ‘The Theory of the Threshold Skipping Species,’ a project he had been working on for four years.

Even when wiped out by a catastrophe, bugs still retained
an amazing immunity to anything that threatened them with utter extinction. Around 1946 they seemed to have been resilient to only two types of insecticides, whereas by the end of the century they had developed resistance to more than a hundred kinds of insecticides. The species that managed to triumph over a chemical formula skipped a threshold. Not only were they unaffected by the poisons that had destroyed their predecessors, but they ended up, in the long run, producing new species. The crucial issue, Professor Kandinsky maintained, was not as much to discover how on earth bugs acquired this particular knowledge as to discover knowledge
in its entirety
. According to him, those premonitions that were a long source of disappointment for the Enlightenment thinkers, who regarded the social and the natural sciences as one totality, would be realised in the century that was just arriving, along with its catastrophes. Humans too were sooner or later bound to skip a threshold. Not because they were God’s beloved servants, as the pious believed, not because they possessed the adequate mental capacity, as the rationalists assumed, but mainly because they too were condemned to the same ‘Circle of Knowledge’ as God and bugs. The societal nature of bugs’ lives and the intuitive nature of human civilizations had been attached to each other with and within the same durable chain:
sociobiology
. Consequently, just as artists weren’t as inventive as supposed, nor was nature aloof from craftsmanship. To stay alive, whenever they could, cockroaches and writers drew water from the same pool of knowledge and intuition.

‘I doubt if they have read even the first page,’ Professor Kandinsky had roared when the news of his report being rejected had reached him. It was a week before his death. They had sat side by side on the steps of the little used exit door of the laboratory where they worked together – a colossal building where Russia’s gifted biologists worked systematically for thirteen hours a day. Yet from a distance, it was hard to tell how huge it was for it had been built three floors under the
ground. Since the feeling of being among the chosen brings people closer to each other, everyone inside was highly polite to one another. Only Professor Kandinsky was unaffected by the molecules of graciousness circulating in the air. Not only did he decline to smile at others but also sealed his lips except when forced to utter a few words. He had little tolerance for people, the only exception being Nadia Onissimovna who had been his assistant for nine years and who had won his confidence with her submissiveness as much as her industriousness. Professor Kandinsky was as cantankerous and reticent as he was glum and impatient. Deep down, Nadia Onissimovna suspected he was not as grumpy as he seemed, and even if he was, he had probably turned into a wreck of nerves only as a result of conducting electrically charged experiments day and night for years. Even back in those days she couldn’t help but seek plausible excuses for the coarse behaviour of those she loved.