The Flea Palace (25 page)

As to why she could not watch ‘The Oleander of Passion’ without doing something else at the same time, there were a couple of reasons behind that. Firstly, she found the soap opera so mind-numbing that she could barely bear it without some sort of a distraction. Secondly, when she kept herself busy with another task at the same time, the hidden discomfort of having become a hackneyed viewer of a hackneyed soap opera tended to diminish. Perhaps most importantly, however, by keeping busy with other things she could prove to herself how much she disparaged not only the soap opera, but also that leading actress of it, namely Loretta.

‘The Oleander of Passion’, like all other soap operas, was broadcast on weekdays only. However, despite the fact that all the other soaps were constantly in the public eye, via fragments from upcoming episodes and gossip from the real lives of the actors saturating the papers, not a single line – good or bad – had yet appeared about either ‘The Oleander of Passion’ cast members in general or Loretta in particular. It was not only the newspapers that remained so indifferent on this matter. Among the acquaintances His WifeNadia had made in Istanbul, there was not a single person who had heard of the programme, let alone become a regular viewer. It was as if the entire country had unanimously pledged to feign ignorance of ‘The Oleander
of Passion’. The fact that nobody took the soap opera seriously did not by any means please HisWifeNadia. After all, for the vilification of anything to have any value whatsoever, the thing sneered at should at least be of some value for some people in the first place. Under these circumstances, it was neither gratifying nor consequential to vilify Loretta. Thus, HisWifeNadia kept her thoughts to herself. No one knew anything about her obsession with this soap opera: not even her husband…least of all him…

Be that as it may, the fact that the papers mentioned nothing about the future episodes of the ‘The Oleander of Passion’ did not seem that awful to HisWifeNadia. There wasn’t much to pry into anyway since almost every forthcoming event, including the most imperative secrets, were already revealed in the early episodes. As such, perhaps the real riddle was less to find out what the ending would be than to find out how the already proven ending would be eventually arrived at. If there was anyone who still did not know the mysteries woven in the soap opera it certainly wasn’t the viewer but rather Loretta herself. In the fire that had erupted in episode five, she had lost not only the mansion she lived in, along with her title of a lady, but her memory as well. Ever since then, she had been struggling to recall who she was and mistaking an unknown woman for her mother. She could not even fathom that the famous physician whose photographs she kept seeing in the newspapers had once been, and actually still was, her husband. Since her condition had worsened in the ensuing episodes, she was now about to be checked into a clinic – a move destined to complicate things further given the fact that her physician-the-husband/husband-the-physician happened to work there.

Deep down HisWifeNadia was fond of being so well informed about all these things that still remained a mystery to Loretta herself. Whenever the latter made a wrong turn failing to spot the truth behind the intricacies she faced, HisWifeNadia was secretly thrilled. At such moments, her life and the one in the soap opera would sneak into one another.
Between these two entirely dissimilar universes it was Loretta who stood out as the common denominator, the passageway from one to another. Physically, she was there in the life of the soap opera; and vocally, she was here in the life of HisWifeNadia. Ultimately, there were two distinct women around: the Latin American actress who played Loretta on the one side, and the Turkish speaker who voiced Loretta on the other. Though none of them was named Loretta in real life, in her mind HisWifeNadia had identified both with that particular name. She had no problem whatsoever with the first Loretta, the Latin American actress being of no concern to her. Her foremost target was not the Loretta she watched but the one she heard. It was that voice that she had been after for so long; a voice with no face…a velvety, dulcet voice that came to life in a knobby, peach-puff kneecap… Nonetheless, since every voice required a visage and every visage a voice, as she stood watching ‘The Oleander of Passion’, the voice she heard and the face she saw would so easily blend into one another that HisWifeNadia would soon miss the target, shifting her focus from the woman doing the voiceover to the Latin American actress on the screen. Then she could do little to prevent herself from watching the soap opera with a twisted gaze; taking pleasure in the scenes where Loretta was in pain and feeling distressed whenever things went well for her.

The Loretta on the screen was a slender brunette with jade eyes and long legs. When she cried, tears round as peas rolled down her cheeks. As for the woman who did Loretta’s voiceover, HisWifeNadia could not quite surmise what her body looked like since she had not been able to eye-her-up thoroughly on that ominous day when the two had run into each other. She must be one of those ephemeral beauties, HisWifeNadia guessed, as fleeting and frail as a candle flame. Shine as she might with the freshness of youth at the present, her beauty would be tarnished sooner or later, in five years at most. When that day arrived, she would have to pull herself together and stop going after married men. Still, five years was
a long time – long enough to cause HisWifeNadia anguish, as she had to face the prospects of all the things that could happen until then.

It was a pure coincidence that had made HisWifeNadia aware of Loretta’s voice three months ago. On the morning of that ill-starred day, she was in the kitchen once again to cook
ashure
. Even though she had considerably improved her culinary skills since her arrival in Turkey, her
ashure
was still not as good as she – Metin Chetinceviz more precisely – wanted it to be. Countless experiments had all ended up in flop. There was either too much or too little sugar or some ingredient missing altogether, and if not these, even when everything was mixed in properly, something would go wrong in the cooking phase. When cooked for an adequate amount of time, she would remove the
ashure
from the stove and dole it out into frosty pink cups. Desperate to have made it right this time, she would take great pains to garnish each and every cup with pomegranate seeds. In the beginning there was a time when she used to overdo this, dissatisfied with the hackneyed decorations of Turkish housewives. Longing for novelty, instead of a dash of grated coconuts, roasted hazelnuts or powdered sugar, she would sprinkle a few drops of cognac or place sour cherries fermented in rum. Back then she was interested more in the legend of the
ashure
than in how the Turks consumed it.

The
ashure
in the legend was the epitome of a triumph deemed unachievable. All the creatures boarding Noah’s ship in pairs to escape doomsday had cooked it together at a time when they could no longer endure the journey, when they were surrounded on four sides with water and were in danger of extinction given an empty pantry and with a long way still to go. Each animal had handed over its leftovers and hence this amazing concoction had emerged by mixing things that would otherwise never match. Though there was not much doubt as to what modern-day
ashure
was composed of, still the components of this dessert weren’t entirely evident, and extra ingredients things could be added into it any time. It was
precisely this lack of a fixed recipe that made
ashure
so unlike other desserts. Neither the ingredients were restricted nor the measurements fixed. As such, it ultimately resembled a cosmopolitan city where foreigners would not be excluded and latecomers could swiftly mix with the natives.
Ashure
was limitlessness generated by limited options, affluence born from scarcity and vast assortment burgeoning out of extinction.

About all these HisWifeNadia wrote at length to her aunt – an elderly spinster with legs covered with purplish varicose veins and hair as red as hell. In her letters HisWifeNadia wrote extensively about how drastically she had changed since her arrival in Turkey, how much time she now set aside to cook and also how she had come to acknowledge her aunt’s analogies between meals and the verses in the sacred book. Her aunt was highly pious and just as good a cook. She resolutely, if not condescendingly, believed these two attributes of hers amounted to the same thing since ‘The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened’ (Matthew 4:33). The meals she cooked for her family, she placed upon God’s table and watching her children gobble them down she felt blissful as if it were He who had been fed.

‘There exists a command of God in every meal we consume,’ the aunt was fond of claiming. ‘Needless to say, that is with the exception of the slapdash meals invented by those messy women who apparently have no time to cook and mistake freedom with neglecting their homes, preferring the praise of their bosses to the gratitude of their children!’

Now in her letters to this aunt, HisWifeNadia wrote that among all the food of the world, if any were to be likened to the Tower of Babel in the Holy Bible, it had to be this
ashure
. Just like in the Tower of Babel, in the pudding cauldron too, miscellaneous types that would otherwise never come together managed to mingle without fusing into one another. Just as the workers at the Tower had failed to comprehend each other’s language, so too did each ingredient in the cauldron retain its
distinctiveness within that common zest. The fig in the
ashure
, for instance, though subjected to so many processes and boiled for so long, still preserved its own flavour. As they boiled there on the stove, all the ingredients prattled on in unison but each in its own language.

Hence supplementary ingredients could be incessantly added to this totality. If there was room in
ashure
for garbanzo beans, why not add corn as well? Where there was fig, there could be plum too, or why not peach alongside apricot, pasta in the company of rice…? In her first few months at Bonbon Palace, HisWifeNadia had for a reason still unknown to her fervently busied herself with such experiments. Yet, ramming each time into Metin Chetinceviz’s fierce retorts, she had in next to no time exhausted her daring to experiment with further combinations. Whatever the legend of Noah’s Arc and the adventure behind it, when it came to putting the teachings into practice,
ashure
turned out to be a highly unadventurous food. It did not welcome innovations. Her aunt, though never in her life having cooked
ashure
, must have arrived at the same conclusion for she had felt the need to caution in her letters that just as one could not modify the verses of the Bible as one pleased, it was better not to play with ingredients freely either. Eventually HisWifeNadia had given up, starting to cook the
ashure
in line with the routine. Be that as it may, perhaps because deep inside she still pined for a boundless variation and had never been able to make do with the ingredients in hand, the end product had failed to meet her expectations all this time.

Nonetheless, there was one occasion, that ill-starred day, when she had inexplicably been satisfied with her
ashure
. Having finished the cooking, as usual, she had put the cauldron aside to cool off, prepared the frosty pinky cups and started waiting eagerly for her husband to come home. Now that she had accomplished the outcome she had craved for so long, she expected to finally receive Metin Chetinceviz’s appreciation. Yet, she had soon noticed that stinking amber briefcase of his
was not in its place. That could only mean one thing: Metin Chetinceviz was going to head to his second job this evening, from which he would probably return around midnight. Her achievement at
ashure
had excited HisWifeNadia so much that she couldn’t possibly wait that long. Hence she decided to do something that had never crossed her mind before: to pay a visit to Metin Chetinceviz’s workplace with a cup of
ashure
.

Though it had been four years since she had arrived in this city, Istanbul remained a colossal mystery to her. She had seen so little of the city so far that she had no sense of the direction in which its streets lay nor any sense of its structure in her mind. Her ensuing audacity might therefore be attributed to nothing but ignorance. In such a state she headed to the studio on the Asian Side. Though crossing the Bosphorus Bridge had cost her two hours, finding the address turned out to be unexpectedly easy. She left her identification card at the entrance, received information from the receptionist, got in the elevator, went up to the fifth floor, walked to Room 505, peeped inside and stood petrified. Metin Chetinceviz was there sitting knee-to-knee with a woman; he had placed one hand on the knobby, peach-puff kneecap of the latter which puckered like a blemish too timid to come to light. As for his other hand, he employed that to rotate a tiny coffee cup, as he told the woman her fortune. It must have been good news, for a dimpled smile had blossomed on the latter’s face. Fixated with her husband, HisWifeNadia was not able to eye-up the woman as much as she would like to. It wasn’t so much the fact that she’d been cheated on which rendered her speechless, rather the affectionate expression on Metin Chetinceviz’s face. Neither the woman in the room, nor the hand caressing her knee seemed a sight as horrid as the affectionate expression upon her husband’s face, so dulcet and tender, so unlike her husband.

Up until now, HisWifeNadia had forgiven each and every one of Metin Chetinceviz’s wrongs and in her jaded way endured his never-ending jealousies, callousness, even slaps, believing that he did it all involuntarily, almost against his own
will. Yes, her husband treated her in an awful way occasionally – that is, frequently – that is, constantly – but this was because he did not know any better. To sustain a flawed marriage requires, in essence, rather than an obstinate faith in marriage a faith in obduracy as such. We can endure being treated brutally by the person we love, if and only if, and as long as, we can convince ourselves that he knows no better and is unable to act in any other way.