The Flea Palace (11 page)

‘Oh, look, look! It’s raining clothes from above!’ shouted the manicurist in excitement, having been rummaging through the shelf in front of the window to find the Number 113 burgundy nail polish.

Cemal, the plump ginger-head, the blonde with a slight cast in her eye and the apprentices all dashed over to the window in an instant. A little later, upon their insistence the Blue Mistress came also with reluctant steps and the jittery brunette limped over trying not to step on her pedicured feet. Clothes were indeed raining from above; children’s clothes in all types and colours. Judging by the crowd of eight to ten people gathered on the sidewalk, there were other spectators of this unexpected show. All had turned their heads up and were fixated on a single point trying to see the person throwing the clothes. Yet the perpetrator of the incident refused to reveal themself. Just a naked, unadorned, snow white woman’s arm
appeared at regular intervals from the window of the flat at the top floor of Bonbon Palace, on each appearance dropping yet another piece of clothing.

As the clothes rained down one after another, the manicurist stretched out of the window to catch the falling clothes with the happiness of someone trying to touch the first snow of the season. From among the dresses, socks, sweaters, shirts, pullovers, she managed to catch a resin yellow ribbon.

‘Don’t do that, it’s not proper,’ said Madame Auntie who had maintained her composure through it all. Her lifeless voice raised and lowered like a knobby wall or a jagged piece of paper.

The manicurist grumbled with the deep disappointment of being forced to be virtuous just as she had started to savour being witness to another person’s insanity. With a long face, she threw the ribbon on top of the mound of clothes in the garden. It did not last long. After a minute or two the rain of clothes stopped by itself. The concluding act of the show was a royal-blue school uniform. Like some sort of coy parachute it opened up to land quietly on top of its predecessors. The windows of the top floor were noisily shut and the snow white arm retreated inside. As the spectators on the sidewalk dispersed one by one, the ones inside returned to their places as well.

‘Sonny, make all of us coffee,’ said Cemal to the apprentice without pimples. ‘God knows, our nerves are on edge.’ He collapsed onto the large couch, suddenly feeling exhausted. ‘We’re sick of it. Ever since we moved in here, things have been raining on our heads. The cracked woman has not left a thing in the house, she opens the windows whenever she loses her temper and “whoosh!” whatever there is comes down. One of these days she’s going to throw down a TV set or something like that and whichever one of us gets it in the head will die for nothing.’

Though he remained pensive for a moment, it would not take Cemal long to collect himself together. He was always somewhat scared of sadness settling in with no palpable reason.

‘So inventive! Never have I seen her throwing the same
thing twice. Celal, do you remember, she once threw down her husband’s ties and they remained stuck on the rose acacia tree for days.’

A hearty response from his brother being one of the last things he expected to get at this moment, Cemal turned not to him but the customers instead: ‘Celal got out and brought the ties down. He didn’t let the young ones out fearing they’d break the branches of the rose acacia. He climbed himself. Had it not been for him, the stupid man’s ties would have been hanging out for days.’

Celal smiled with a visible distress. ‘I hope someone will gather the clothes up. It’s getting dark, God knows someone could steal them,’ he mumbled to escape being the focus of the conversation.

‘She’s gathering them up. The new cleaning lady is down there gathering all of them up. What a shame, the poor woman is red with embarrassment as if she’d thrown them down herself,’ blurted out the manicurist.

‘It won’t be long. This one will soon quit as well,’ mumbled the jittery brunette as she puffed away, examining the permanently waved strands of hair that had started to appear from under the thin rollers that the apprentice with the pimples had started to undo.

‘Oh, can any cleaning lady survive Tijen? Whoever comes runs away,’ remarked Cemal.

‘Hygiene Tijen! Hygiene Tijen!’ giggled the blonde with a cast in her eye. ‘The woman hasn’t stepped out of her house for exactly four months. Can you imagine? She hasn’t been able to go outside for fear of catching a disease. She’s utterly mad these days.’

‘Come on, what do you mean by these days, for God’s sake? Those who are in-the-know will tell it straight, she’s always been nuts. Madam Auntie’s known them since day one. Isn’t it so, Madam Auntie?’ shouted the manicurist. Like many of her peers, she too felt the need to raise her voice when talking to an elderly person.

All heads turned to the old woman. Actually no one knew why she was called, ‘Madam Auntie’. Neither had they hitherto wondered whether she was Muslim or not, though if asked, chances are they would affirm that she was a Muslim and a Turk just like everyone else. The reason they could not help but call her ‘Madam’, was not because they had any doubts about her religion or citizenship, they just felt deep down that she was different, though they were unable to explain why. It was not because she was so advanced in years (though she certainly was) or because her manners were unusual (though they certainly were) that she differed from others; her oddness was less visible and yet was easily detectable. Since her nature little resembled that of the others, ‘Madam’ she remained. Besides, having been here for so many years she had much older roots than anyone else, she was the only one among them who was born and raised in Istanbul. While most of the neighbours were immigrants, her entire life had been spent in this neighbourhood. Unlike the others, she had not popped up out of nowhere, turning her back to a future that never came and a past that was never left behind. Here she was, neither dragged along by others nor having dragged others behind her. Her name was ‘Auntie’ because her very being was a residue of a past none of them had lived.

Madam Auntie lowered her head with a withered smile. She looked at her blue, purple and burgundy hands with brown spots drizzled over them. The same spots, only smaller and more faded, had been randomly sprinkled from her temples to her cheeks. If these had been the loudest colours on her skin, she would have looked, like many women her age, too old to age further. Yet the orange of her lipstick that seemed less spread on than glued on, the sunny yellowness of her leaf-shaped gold earrings, the rouge on her cheeks that made the concentric wrinkles stand out line by line, the purple tones of eye shadow that collected on her eyelids layer upon layer, the navy, blue and grey twinkle of her turquoise eyes, and then of course, the platinum yellow of her hair, had opened up wayward
passageways to the unknown, behind her far from sombre appearance. Her putting on so much make-up regardless of her age had bestowed upon her a grand ridiculousness. Like all grandly ridiculous people, she too had a scary side.

As such, she was a live-wire that added extra spark to all chats. When she was around, it was hard to talk behind people’s backs or get any pleasure from the art of slander or exaggeration, but the opposite was also true. The air of sobriety of Madam Auntie made the women in the beauty parlour recall the mixed pleasure they had last tasted during their high school years when they took a common stand against a very righteous teacher, while craving to impress her at the same time. Their convoluted chats were tidied up so that they reached the right consistency as they trod around and penetrated from many directions the principles she voiced and the values she defended. In addition, the pleasure they received multiplied when they were at times able to include her in their aspirations. For great is the pleasure of drawing the pure to slovenly ways, to then see how they are like everyone else, worth only as much.

The plump brunette must have felt the same for she could not resist; she backed the manicurist in a collective attempt to convince the old woman: ‘They say Hygiene Tijen was no different as a young girl but definitely got worse after getting married. She’s a hygiene-freak.’

‘Come on, is that so bad? She’s just a fastidious woman,’ objected Madam Auntie making an effort to put the matter behind them.

‘Auntie, this isn’t fastidiousness, it’s an illness,’ shouted the manicurist with the courage pumped into her from the reinforcements. ‘Maybe even worse. When you’re ill, you know it. You go to the physician and get treated, right? There’s no cure for hygiene-freaks! If there was one, Misses Tijen wouldn’t put it in her mouth, she’d find it too filthy!’

‘What a shame! Her child suffers the most,’ said the blond with the one eye cast.

‘Don’t say that,’ muttered Madam Auntie. ‘Tijen dotes on her daughter. How can a mother possibly want any harm to come to her child?’

‘Fine, Madam Auntie, but what kind of a love can we understand from it? Look, she threw down all of the poor kid’s clothes,’ yelled the manicurist.

‘Really?’ uttered Madam Auntie in astonishment.

The manicurist exclaimed with the thrill of having finally said something the old woman could not object to: ‘Of course, all those clothes raining upon our heads belong to that poor kid. See that she doesn’t throw out her own clothes. The woman is nutty but not insane. She’s perfectly sane when it suits her interests!’

The old woman puckered her thin lips with suspicion. ‘Really, so she threw out the child’s clothes. Why, I wonder?’

‘Why do you think, because she’s nutty…’

Madam Auntie’s face darkened. Realizing she had gone too far the manicurist hushed, nonetheless pleased that she had said all she wanted to say.

‘Oh, what’s it to us? If she’s nutty, so be it!’ roared Cemal. Though enjoying the gossip, he was worried the manicurist’s idle talk would bother the old woman and so anger Celal. ‘Are we to bother with the troubles of every nutter? Is there anything more in Istanbul other than nutters? Here we see lots of them, as many as
bulgur
. If we talk about each one of them, we’ll do so until the end of our lives. Sonny, what happened to the coffees? Bring them here, we’re parched.’

In an attempt to change the topic, Celal intervened. ‘This garbage smell has increased again. We complained to the municipality so many times. It didn’t help at all.’

‘What did they say? They said they’ve turned the garbage collection business over to a private company,’ added Cemal instantly, always fond of completing the half-uttered sentences of his twin. ‘Then we found the company’s phone number. They too are boors. They send the truck out right in the middle of rush hour when people are on their way back from work, as if out of spite.’

‘They do come and collect the garbage regularly, though at the wrong hour. Alas however, we still haven’t been able to get rid of this smell,’ summed up Celal.

‘Of course we can’t get rid of it. With so much
bulgur
around, we can be rid of neither garbage nor cultural backwardness.’ Cemal said heatedly. ‘Now can you believe it, Madam Auntie? We spend our days scolding the people who leave their garbage by this wall. All the ignorant illiterate women in this neighbourhood leave their garbage by our garden wall and always the same types – so pig headed. I’m tired of repeating it! There’s one in particular you especially don’t want to know about. The woman’s house is right at the end of the street. She doesn’t mind, she walks three hundred metres every day to dump her garbage here. I long pondered why on earth someone would do such a thing. I finally came up with an explanation: there was probably a field here long before this apartment building was constructed. Back then, this woman’s grandmother would dump her garbage here. Eventually, that woman had a daughter and when that one was grown up, she too would always dump her garbage at the same place. Then she too had a daughter. That’s the
bulgur
I have a row with every one of God’s days. Their interest in garbage is hereditary, passes from mother to daughter. A type of family tradition! Mind you, what could she do, she’s just continuing whatever she has seen. But unlike her ancestors, she doesn’t pour it out of a pail, she puts it in a plastic bag first. A modern
bulgur
!’

While the others laughed and Cemal grumbled, Madam Auntie shook her head deep in thought. ‘But Cemal,’ she said, ‘this place wasn’t a field in the past. Underneath this entire neighbourhood are graveyards…’

Not at all prepared for such an objection, Cemal swallowed back all the words that were getting ready to leave his tongue. As he looked around him in distress as if for help, he was waylaid by a teeny-tiny, constantly moving shadow at the bottom of the counter in front of the mirror. It was a cockroach. It had climbed the basket of rollers, moving his
antenna as if listening to the chat. Good thing it had not yet attracted anyone’s attention. However, if it decided to get out of the basket and walk along the counter, it would shortly be parading in front of each and every customer. Cemal grabbed the large bristle hairbrush and approached sideways in a crab-walk, at the same time talking even more excitedly so as not to let on.

‘ “Look here, woman!” I say, “Do I come and dump my garbage on your carpet? With what right can you leave your garbage on someone else’s wall? Wait for the garbage truck to come at night, then you can take it outside your own door and the garbage men would pick it up.” No, she doesn’t understand at all – because of that
bulgur
I tell you!’

‘What
bulgur
?’ asked the Blue Mistress, popping her head up from the third page news where she was hiding from the constant looks of the apprentice with the pimples.

‘Oh, don’t you know my
bulgur
theory? Let me tell you right away,’ said Cemal without taking his eyes off the cockroach. ‘It’s actually very simple. Now, is there population planning in Turkey? No! Oh God gives them to you, so keep giving birth and let them loose onto the streets. Okay, let’s say you let them loose, but how are you going to feed so many kids? One person you feed with meat, five people with meat and
bulgur
, ten with only
bulgur
. OK, is this
bulgur
beneficial to human intelligence? No! You can then keep on telling the woman as many times as you want. “Come on sister, don’t dump your garbage in my garden!” I keep on hollering. She stupidly stares at my face. Then the following day at the same time she comes again and dumps again as if wound up like a watch. She doesn’t understand, how could she, with the brains of
bulgur
?’