The Flea Palace (30 page)

When stretched out on his back onto the only sofa in the living room with a rolled cigarette in hand, Sidar would fix his eyes on this ceiling for hours. While the smoke circulated in his blood full speed, the ceiling would acquire an astounding vivacity. At such times, Wittgenstein’s black and white picture reddened, as the philosopher’s face blushed; the miniature figures in the cartoons of Selcuk hopped and jumped around the ceiling; Spiderman dangled from a thread climbing up and down; the coronas in Blake’s drafts started to blink as if relaying messages in code; Carrington’s hairless magician melted into his own image and disappeared; Goya’s bogeyman all of a sudden took the white sheet off to reveal his face; a cruel smile appeared on the Scientific Circumciser’s face; Hygieia’s breasts heaved with excitement; the figures on the photograph at the Haydarpasa train station one by one withered away. Before long, Sidar would feel the blood in his veins, as well as the two droplets of energy he possessed withdraw from his body, and
he’d abandon himself in a woozy, puffy sea of ecstasy. When Gaba too came along and curled under his legs, the Flat 2 and its two inhabitants swimming in composure would form one flawless whole.

There existed only one thing that Sidar enjoyed ruminating: death. He did not do so consciously; in fact, consciousness was not at all the issue here, for he didn’t invite the thoughts, rather they flocked to his mind on their own. His obsession with death was not a choice; he had been like this since childhood. He found death neither scary enough to grieve, nor grievous enough to be scared of. All he wanted was to understand it fully, truly. Whenever he met new people, before anything else, it was their attitudes towards death that would arouse his curiosity: whether they were scared of death or not, had lost someone close, had someone die before their eyes, had ever felt they could kill someone, did they believe in the afterlife… There were so many questions he had to ask, but seldom could. He had long before succumbed to the convention that he must hold his tongue on this particular subject. However, whether he could fall in love with a woman or not, feel comfortable at someone’s house, liked a character in a film, how he regarded the author of a book he read, what he thought of the singers he listened to…it all depended on their relation with death. He could appreciate some bastard solely because he had died beautifully or just as well turn up his nose at a dignified person if he had met an ordinary end. Since his interest kept whipping up his knowledge and his knowledge his interest, Sidar possessed a magnificent archive of death in his mind. He never forgot where and how book characters, film stars, national heroes, philosophers, scientists, poets and especially murderers had died. This curiosity of his had cost him dearly at high school wherein all his history teachers hated him: ‘Alexander the Great, oh yeah, he met his end with such a debauched illness: he either burst or, after a two day long feast thrown in his honour, got diarrhoea.’ His interventions in the philosophy class were no different: ‘But in his letters to Voltaire,
the same Rousseau had mentioned with gratitude the Lisbon earthquake that killed hundreds of people. Such occasional cleanings, he thought, were necessary in terms of population quantity and quality.’

The nuggets of knowledge Sidar thus scattered would wreak havoc at each lesson. Upon learning Alexander had breathed his last due to diarrhoea, his greatness tended to wane and his reputation dwindled considerably. In the student’s minds, Rousseau turned into a modern age terrorist while his philosophy fell on deaf ears. When confronted by death, the credibility of a religious scholar notorious for advising his disciples constant abstinence who himself could not make it to the morning after a night of gorging, the respectability of a well-esteemed elderly politician taking his last breath in the nuptial bed the same night he took a new wife half his age, the command of an Ottoman sultan who raided taverns hunting and hanging all those who drank even a drop of wine only to meet his own end through cirrhosis, and the esteem of a scientist squished like a bug while trying to cross a street without looking…all perished drastically… The deaths of the East were at least as preposterous as those of the West. In fact, death itself was preposterous.

‘Since you seem to be paying no attention to my third and final warning, could you please step outside the classroom?’

His teachers never shared his views. Each time he would be thrown out of the classroom but unlike all the other male students who were ejected from the classroom, he would never become a hero in the eyes of the female students. Probably because girls, just like the teachers, did not find death preposterous.

Sidar had expected things to be different in Turkey. After all, dying was easier here; deaths occurred in larger numbers and life was shorter. Alas! Hard as he tried, his remarks on death were largely dismissed. At first he suspected it was because of his Turkish, perhaps he could not properly express himself. However, due to the dogged efforts of his mother — who had
worked as a Turkish teacher until the day they were forced to escape out of the country and who had been worried her son would become alienated from his native tongue through being carried away not only by the French but also the Kurdish his father had tried incompetently to teach him – the long years Sidar spent away from Turkey had caused his Turkish to regress only a couple of steps. The issue was not how he expressed himself but what he expressed. Sidar had detected a number of differences between Switzerland and Turkey on the subject of death, and each point was written on a tiny piece of paper among the bedlam on the ceiling:

1. People in Turkey did not like death to be brought up as a subject (just like in Switzerland)
   
2. Whenever people in Turkey brought up death, they talked about the actual dead rather than the insubstantial idea of death (somewhat different from Switzerland)
   
3. People in Turkey were not able to distinguish death as something abstract (quite different from Switzerland).
   

Yet Istanbul, unlike its inhabitants, was not a bit bothered about the allusions to death. On no account did she shun this subject. At one of the lessons he had not been thrown out of, Sidar had listened attentively to how in the West the fools were put on ships and sent away from the cities. He likened the cemeteries in Switzerland to those ships with unwanted passengers, albeit with one difference, they had cast anchor, unable to drift away. All the same they were just as much insulated from city life. One could go visit the cemeteries at any time but the graves themselves often disembarked to become a part of the city. However, Istanbul had either forgotten to assign its ships to the graves, or the graves had escaped from their ships to disperse into the streets with turbans on their heads and marble stones on their arms. They were everywhere. Scattered all over the city like pollen strewn by the wind. At the corners where local markets were set up
every week, in the midst of shopping malls, in swarming streets, on roads off the beaten track, in fields where the children played, on slopes overlooking the sea, in courtyards of dervish lodges; next to walls, hills, hedges, far and wide they popped up in front of the people in the shape of a tombstone, vault or numerous graves squeezed in between apartment buildings. Pedestrians passed them by as they strolled, scurried, promenaded, shopped… In this city, the dead resided side by side with the living.

Hence after a thirteen year interval, Sidar had spent his first year in Istanbul discovering graves and cemeteries. Sometimes he would consciously stroll around desolate neighbourhoods for this purpose alone, at some other times he would accidentally come across a cemetery and wander off into it. Walking around non-Muslim cemeteries had proved to be far more difficult than the Muslim ones since almost all of the former were surrounded by towering walls and were closed except on certain days. Once when in the garden of a Greek church he had asked what the relief of strewn pomegranate seeds on a tombstone meant and what the writing under it was, the custodian had hopelessly bobbed his head from side to side. He could not read a single word of Greek. Anyhow, he was not Greek but a Gregorian Armenian; for years he had worked at this church during the week and went for religious service to his own church on weekends. Since that encounter, Sidar had stopped presuming that all the people he saw in the Greek cemeteries in Istanbul were Greek, the ones in the Jewish cemeteries Jewish, or the Assyrian ones all Assyrians…

With their low walls and permanently open gates, the Muslim cemeteries were easier to roam. Most of these were badly neglected; it was as if it was not the lives of Muslims that were mortal but rather their cemeteries. Especially the more recent ones gave the impression that they might at any moment get up and migrate somewhere else. Sidar had until now met all sorts of people while walking around these places. Coarse guards, men who read the Qur’an for money by the
graves, slovenly kids with pitchers in their hand who followed the visitors to fork out some money, those who came with all their family and filled baskets as if for a picnic, those who arrived alone and were for hours lost in thought, drunks who imbibed nearby at night, pickpockets who mushroomed wherever there was a crowd, clairvoyants with young, old, urban and rural women as followers… Over time he had learned to differentiate them. The habitual visitors of the Muslim cemeteries fell in two groups: those who came to leave a trace and those who came to follow some sort of lead. The former visited their relatives at regular intervals and then departed leaving behind their prayers, tears, pitchers full of water and flowers. These were harmless, self-contained people when compared to the latter. Those who came to follow some lead or another were rather sinister. They came to steal goods, milk people out of their money, cast a spell, gather signs… That is, they came to get something from the cemeteries and did not leave until they got what they had come for. Those who acquired a profession, wealth, status or a past from the cemeteries were included in this group, as were all soothsayers, the insane, thieves…and also Canadian gynaecologists.

He had met the Canadian gynaecologist and his charming wife, who did not seem to have any knowledge whatsoever about either Turkey or the Turks, at one of the Muslim cemeteries while they were searching the grave of the man’s Turkish grandmother. The young couple had gone around for hours with a cemetery guard eager to help, and as they were on their way out to try their luck at another graveyard, Sidar had not been able to resist asking why they had undertaken such an endeavour. ‘So that I have a family tree to give to my future children,’ the young man had said, his eyes shining. Meanwhile his wife, as if holding the thing called the family tree in their hands, had softly crossed her fingers on her breast and smiled as she lifted her hands up like branches.

Sidar had remembered the brass picture frame in the shape of a tree at their house, one of the few pieces they had taken
with them when they escaped from Turkey. It could fit a total of ten photographs, in round frames big as plums, hung from five separate branches, two on each one. His mother had somehow decided to hang here the pictures of all the family members, starting with her own mother and father. As filling out all the frames had become a problem, as they were unable to reach ten in this manner, they instead exceeded this number by leaps and bounds upon the inclusion of distant relatives. To solve the issue the photographs of the two cousins they loved the most were included. As the frames were too small, each photograph had to be carefully cropped, leaving only a tiny head behind. The heads of the family members had swung on that brass frame for years like the fruits of the mythical Vakvak tree with fruit shaped like humans that, upon being plucked, rotted away in screams.

I do not share the same blood as you. My birth into your family is just a coincidence. I am one of those children who are given life to rock to sleep the fear of mortality. I am one of those children you abandon to produce yet another one upon realizing you still could not escape death. I scatter my semen to the ground. I do not want to fertilize anyone…and, that being the only way not to end by chance lives started by chance, I bless not you, but suicide
…

His interest in death had incited further rebukes from Istanbulites. The people he consulted instead of giving him an answer almost always counselled him to recite the opening chapter of the Qur’an. This he did not do, as he did not know how to recite anyhow and not only did he not know much about Islam, he did not intend to learn anything either. He did not think that any religion had the right to expect obedience from him as long as it continued to ban suicide.

Still he was not as ignorant about Islam as he thought. Every now and then he realized he knew things he didn’t even know he had learned. For memory is like a cyclist going downhill fast against the wind: all sorts of knowledge carried by the wind hangs onto you, gets inside your mouth or into your hair and sticks to your skin… Bits and pieces of prayers, the pillars
of Islam, sections from the prophet’s life; he knew all these, though rather feebly. They say that any language learnt as a child will never be forgotten. Sidar was not so sure about that but he could easily defend the claim that the religion learnt as a child will never be forgotten.

When he walked around the cemeteries, he was forced to leave Gaba at the gates. Upon his return, he found him either snoring away or eating a
simit
off the guard’s hand. As he was penniless and also because the bus, minibus or cab drivers were largely unwilling to let Gaba in, they often returned home on foot. Neither did they pay anyone a visit, nor did anyone visit them – with one exception. Only once had they entertained a guest in their house and a female to boot…

Sidar had met her at one of the bars on Istiklal Street. She was the friend of a friend of a friend he had recently met. Other than her coppery hair, the girl had two instantly noticeable characteristics: her eyes and a talent to imbibe beer like a sponge. When the bar had closed down late at night, on her own she had followed Sidar to Bonbon Palace. Once inside, she had scrutinized the flat in a vain attempt to find an item that could be a rapport between the guest and the host. There was no object to talk about. Thank goodness there was Gaba.