The Flea Palace (35 page)

In a wide, weed-filled garden framed by an ornate steel railing, Sidar stood gazing at an amber-haired young girl who had wrapped herself in silvery tulles and stretched out on a
chaise long
. The girl looked astonishingly like one of his sisters but was more beautiful. She had been motioning him to come hither. Sidar checked Gaba sleeping away at the entrance. Though he knew only too well that Gaba should not be left there alone, he pushed open the humongous entrance gate without taking his eyes off the girl and plunged in. Though the garden was greener than it appeared from the outside, the pool at its centre was for some reason bone-dry. Bugs the size of fists wandered around in it. The girl got up smiling and Sidar suddenly saw that she was much, much taller than him. What’s more, the girl did not stop growing, as she stretched toward the sky. The shoes she wore had towering heels. The girl suddenly
stumbled and while trying to recover her balance, she stomped her foot on the ground, making a noise that sounded like ‘Tock!’. ‘Don’t!’ Sidar exclaimed, but this plea of his created just the opposite response from the girl, for she started to stamp her feet like mad: ‘Tock, tock, tock!’

‘Stop doing that. Are you nuts? Stop it!’ Sidar yelled, worrying that Gaba might wake up. He turned back to check him, but the humongous gate with the steel railings that only seconds previously had been cracked open was both closed and now very far away. As the girl kept hopping, ‘Tock, tock, tock,’ what Sidar had feared happened. Gaba started to bark, tearing himself apart. Throwing the girl a bitter look, Sidar ran hurriedly toward the gate. At the same moment he found himself running dazedly toward the door in Flat Number 2 of Bonbon Palace. There was an ear shattering noise all around. While Gaba barked, the door jolted; while the door jolted, Gaba barked some more.

When Sidar had finally opened the door, standing in front of him was Muhammet, proud to have made his kicks talk. The child gave him a once over from top to toe and held out a napkin-covered plate: ‘Madam Auntie sent you this.’

Sidar rapidly rid himself of his grogginess and smiled brazenly. A joke had come true. The traditional
halva
that old women neighbours distributed from door-to-door had reached him just at the right time, just when he was yearning for sweets after an acid trip. Sidar and his friends had termed this among themselves: ‘Tradition infiltrating the unconventional.’ He thanked the child, stumbling over his words in delight, grabbed the plate and slammed the door on him. Having caught the smell of the recently delivered food, Gaba had stopped barking, waiting eagerly with his wet nose in the air. Sidar winked at him teasingly, lifted the napkin and stood dumbfounded. What faced him was not
halva
, but two floured cookies.
Floured cookies with the ends slightly crushed and the powdered sugar on top spilled
. Sidar’s face paled.

He had remembered.

As I sat on the balcony sipping my drink, ‘Why don’t you think of something to stop these folks?’ Ethel asked, grabbing the railing with fingernails painted a hue of dried apricot. Where she pointed, I spotted a headscarfed woman throwing her garbage by the side of the garden wall.

I shrugged. It doesn’t make any difference anymore if I open or close the windows. With the weather warming up every passing day the garbage smell gets worse. If exposed to this malodour on the street, one walks faster, if in the car, one rolls the windows up. However, if the house you live in, the morning you wake up into, the night you sleep through, the walls, the windows, the doors and every direction you turn to stinks, then you are trapped. There is no way of stepping outside the yoke of smell. Every night when I return home I encounter yet another warped garbage hill by the side wall of the apartment building. Every night a brand new garbage mound awaits me comprising of stuffed plastic bags of all sizes marked with the emblems of the grocers and markets in the neighbourhood, bags with their tops tied but for some reason always with a hole or slit at the bottom, cardboard boxes tossed here and there, items that once belonged to godknowswhom, and black clouds of buzzing flies landing on and taking-off from the leaking watermelon juices and scattered scraps. Cats too… dozens of cats loom hither and thither…some skinny, some chubby, all indifferent to passers-by, bedridden in their foul-smelling kingdom, basking all day
long over, inside and under the garbage bags, as their number increases incessantly, alarmingly…

I watch the garbage hill at various hours of the day. Before noon there already is a substantial pile, which mounts further during the rest of the day. Close to dusk, two gypsies, one juvenile, other elderly, arrive with their handcarts and pick at the garbage. They load tin cans, newspapers and glass bottles into separate sacks to take them away. Life down there seems to be based on endless repetition where each part complements one another: the cats dig up what the flies have set their eyes on, the gypsies pick on what the cats have dug up, the garbage truck that enters the street every evening at the rush hour takes away what remains from the gypsies, what the garbage truck scatters, the flies, cats and seagulls swipe at once again. Within this ceaseless rotation whatever diminishes is speedily replenished, never letting that sour smell fade away.

‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked. ‘Should I stand guard by the wall?’

‘Do something so drastic that they’ll never again want to dump garbage here. Come on sugar-plum, use your brain! You’ll think of something,’ she said once again finishing her
rakι
before I did.

I leaned back lighting a cigarette. Oddly, there are no ants tonight. As the smoke coiled like gauze in the air, out of the blue, an idea as tiny as a louse crossed my mind.

Watching Gaba lick the crumbs of the floured cookies with his rough, rose-pink tongue, Sidar couldn’t help recalling a particular day of his childhood. It was a snowy Saturday. They had paid a visit to grandma, as they always did on Saturday mornings, but this time for some reason their visit had been shorter than usual. Ever since they had left the old woman’s house, his mother and father had been walking arm-in-arm, murmuring reticently. Sidar, whom no one expected would grow up to be so tall and lanky back in those years, was covered in layers of clothes, lolloping like a cabbage; his reindeer-motif wool beret pulled down to his ears and the same coloured scarf wound around his neck. As the distance between him and his parents who were coming at a snail’s pace from behind extended, Sidar took the liberty of tramping through all the puddles on his way. He could thus estimate the graveness of the quiet quarrel between his parents. The only thing adults need to do to make their children sense the inauspiciousness hovering in the air without explicitly declaring the news is simply to not get angry at things that always anger them. Accordingly, Sidar had fathomed something was wrong. For him to be convinced this day was like any other day, he first had to find a deep, dirty mud puddle to march in, and upon doing so, be rebuked by his mother and conceivably slapped by his father.

Before long he came across what he wanted, a russet, murky hole full of mud, the depth of which he could not possibly
estimate. Doggedly, almost blindly he stomped in it and would have simply spurted ahead had he not heard an indistinct growl right at that instant. He flinched, checked the surroundings but couldn’t see anyone. It was as if the voice had come from under his feet…as if the mud had been hurt… Perhaps it was a warning urging him to stay back. Perhaps this hole in front of him was one of those infamous death holes the municipality dug up to then forget to refill: a brown, bottomless dirty death hole… It frightened him, but the fear of death, Sidar sensed for the first time, was not that frightful. He moved forward.

His heart pounded wildly. How deep was the hole, where was its bottom? Perhaps in a step or two he would be swallowed up… In his mind’s eye he visualized his death, the hole gulping him up, leaving behind nothing but his red deer patterned beret. He imagined his mother and father passing by the hole, still talking fervently, then returning down all the roads they had passed searching for their only son. The more he thought about it the more he took pleasure in making everyone pay for past offences: slanders that had hurt him, squabbles that had injured him, the injustices he had been subjected to… It felt good to envisage how his friends and relatives who had been separately responsible for each one of these slights would repent upon learning he had died.

Yet before he was able to arrive even at the midpoint of his dreams, he had reached the end of the puddle. He grudgingly stepped out and still stomping his feet, dropping burly mud drops, he turned the street corner only to stop there flummoxed. Right across from him, by the sidewalk, lay a puppy. Those blaring sounds had emanated not from the death-hole of the Istanbul municipality but from this puny, black-eyed puppy. It had no blood on its coat, no visible cut or wound. The wheel tracks of the minibus that had sped over it were not detectable. Sidar’s face paled. Realizing that the death he had lavishly dreamt of a minute previous was now so close and yet so external to him, he felt stupid. All these visions that carried him away were incongruous and all the aspirations he set up futile.
The only things that were real to him at that moment were the mud left on his trousers, which was already drying up, and the pain tormenting this puppy. The rest was entirely meaningless. He had a family but was lonely; he was constantly belittled by everyone and he in turn constantly belittled everyone; he did not know how to be happy and did not think he could learn it either; he had turned eleven but was still a child in everyone’s eyes; no one asked his opinion on anything and even if they did, he did not have any opinion anyway.

No doubt he should have returned and asked for help from his parents or else, moved forward to help the puppy himself, but he could do none of these things. He nervously thrust his hands into his pockets and simply waited. The sour despondency of his parents was approaching step by step from the back: this was life. In front of him, a puppy speedily slid from pain into oblivion: that was death. As for Sidar, he did not want to join either side; he would stay as far away as possible from both the death that excluded him and the life from which he had excluded himself. If only he could withdraw behind his eyelids the way he had hidden under the coat, gloves, beret and scarf. Lost in his thoughts it took him some time to realize what the soft thing in his left pocket was. It was a floured cookie.

‘The girls will stay with me,’ grandma had remarked broodingly that morning. ‘But the male child, he has to be by the side of his father.’

When Sidar had entered the kitchen, the two women had their backs to him. They were doling out the freshly baked floured cookies into the porcelain plates lined up on the counter. ‘Don’t leave me without news,’ grandma had mumbled. ‘But as soon as your new phone is connected, call a candy store first thing.’

When a new phone was connected at a new house, whom one called first determined all the rest. That was why, with a new phone, before calling friends and relatives, one had to randomly call a candy store so that all the following calls made
from that phone would end sweetly. After having talked to a candy store, one could call a bank, foreign currency bureau or a jeweller to bring in money for future phone calls, a real estate agent to bring in a house, or a car dealer to bring in a car and the like, but possessions and such did not matter that much. What really mattered was for the things to run sweetly. Accordingly, while calling all others depended on one’s own pleasure, calling the candy store was some sort of a duty.

Sidar had been bored stiff there, as he was every Saturday morning. Fortunately they had not stayed for long this time. While the adults had become wobbly with emotion and the children had still not comprehended how different this Saturday morning was from others, they had all been swept toward the outside door with the current of such incessant farewells that it was uncertain who kissed whom and why. The only thing apparent was that the girls were to stay behind with the grandmother. Sidar had no objection to this. He was so pleased to learn that he would be spending the weekend away from his sisters’ yakking that he had not even objected to his mother’s instruction to put on this beret which was made for a girl. However, just as he was about to leave in that covered, wrapped-up state, his grandmother had pulled him to herself fast, stuck him onto her breasts that touched her belly and keeping hold of him tight like this, she had crammed things into his pocket. ‘You’ll eat them on the way,’ she had snivelled as she sniffed her red nose and pointed with one arm to some place in the sky as if the road she referred to was up there somewhere. In that state she had remained stock-still at the threshold, like a burly statue of a woman turned into stone. With her blocking the door in this way, all family members had lined up next to one another along the narrow corridor like forgotten clothes pinned up on a clothesline and left to freeze outside in the cold of the night.

Always confused when confronted with excessive expressions of love, Sidar had finally succeeded in escaping the mangle of grandma’s breasts that smelt slightly of sweat,
intensely of lemon cologne and a whisk of fresh baked bread. That was the exit. From that moment on they had been wandering the streets, he in the front and his mother and father at the back.

As soon as the puppy spotted the floured cookie Sidar took out of his pocket, it stopped wailing. They stood eye-to-eye for an awkward moment. Sidar felt a hatred surge in him; he couldn’t help loathing the animal. Here it was on the verge of death and yet the desire to devour a damn floured cookie flickered like a flimsy flame in its already lustreless black eyes.

A couple of minutes later, his father and mother turned the corner. They approached and saw their son indifferently munching on a cookie in front of a dying puppy. Confronted with such cruel insensitivity, the nerves of both adults, which were thoroughly stretched under the influence of the topic they had been talking about, completely snapped. While his mother yelled at him, his father slapped him on the face.