The Flea Palace (48 page)

His edginess thawing visibly upon hearing these words, Cemal at long last gave the smile he had been withholding since early morning.

At first I thought the kid was lying. Children make things up. I checked my watch. It had been fifteen minutes since the end of the lesson. We had been whispering since then. Just as I was about to leave, she said, ‘Sir, I need to tell you something.’ Hygiene Tijen, Meryem and Esma Hanim were all in the next room busily putting up the curtains they had just washed. From the way they were talking, one could tell that Esma Hanim was up somewhere high, probably on top of the ladder, and Hygiene Tijen was holding her steady from down below. Meryem seemed to be the one giving out instructions. As for us, we talked in wary whispers so as not to be heard.

‘I swear to God I’m telling the truth,’ Su groaned, miffed at my lack of faith.

I feigned being convinced but this time it was her turn to doubt. She wanted me to give my word that I would never ever let slip the secret she had entrusted me with. My word must not have been enough for she then made me repeatedly swear an oath – first on my honour and after that, one by one and name by name, on all my loved ones. Just so that the angst in her big black eyes would abate, I obeyed her every demand. Yet it was as if, far from comforting her, each of my promises rendered her even more anxious. At one point, she went inside swishing around on her slippers and came back carrying a miniature Qur’an with an emerald green cover, the type that people carry in their wallets and handbags. Just so she could be soothed, I swore with the Qur’an in my palm. When I finished,
realizing there was nothing else left to do except trust me, she breathed out a final sigh. Demanding as she is, how could I become annoyed by her demands? Love makes all and sundry miserable, even a child.

‘Come on, let’s put an end to this topic,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. My lips are sealed. I won’t tell anyone.’

Seeing her smile cheered me up. ‘If I do tell your secret to anyone, let God turn me into an ass!’

‘Not an ass, not an ass!’ she objected in a voice that sounded like a chirp.

‘What should I be then?’

By now she had shrugged off all her anxieties and regained that galling glee of hers. She walked around me talking pedantically, listing all the repulsive creatures she knew, in order to find the worst beast ever on the face of the earth. Owls were macabre but not sufficiently wretched; rats were dirty but not gross enough. Cockroaches were nauseating, spiders bloodcurdling, alligators chilling, jellyfish odious, scorpions poisonous, wasps dangerous. Pigs scrabbled in dirt, vultures fed on carrion, bears could devour their own offspring, bats sucked blood. Sea urchins pricked, frogs gave us warts, centipedes snuck into our ears. The worm that emerged from the soil after a rain, the caterpillar that writhed in lettuce, the grasshopper gobbling up the field, the lizard running away leaving behind its tail, the fly not giving anyone peace, the mosquito sucking blood…all had an unpleasant side to them but none were malicious enough. Even the leech, which looked more disgusting than all of them put together, could be of use to humans and was thus disqualified. What she searched for was something much worse than all of these creatures: something that was of no use either to itself or to others, something incompatible with any kind of benevolence, whose existence was apparently without any real purpose and one comparatively worse than all those absolutely useless but just as harmless creatures God had created with leftover clay. Such was the sort of creature she needed to scare me with turning
into if I did not hold my oath one day.

‘If you’re searching for the worst creature, you should pay attention to the eyes. Those whose eyes you can look into are usually not as bad as those whose eyes you can’t see.’

This she liked so much that she instantly ripped out a page from her lily adorned notebook and started making a list of creatures whose eyes could not be seen. So seriously she took the task that it wasn’t possible to change the topic or to get up and leave. While she tried to pick up a punishment among an assortment of punishments for my potential betrayal, I tried to help her as best as I could.

‘Let me be a rattle snake,’ I hissed, squeezing my tongue in between my teeth.

‘Nooooo!’

‘Let me be a piranha,’ I rattled, opening my mouth wide.‘Come on, noooo!’

‘I can’t get you to like anything,’ I pretended to be disgruntled.

I guess until that moment, I was having fun, but all of a sudden an abstruse distress descended upon me. I put on my watch. This preposterous game had gone on too long and I don’t know why but it had started to get on my nerves. Just as I was thinking about leaving, ‘I found it, I found it,’ she cackled her voice lilting with delight. ‘There was no need to search after all!’

‘You’re now going to repeat after me, ok?’ she asked, so easily and swiftly shifting from the formal speech form we normally used to a far more casual one. I nodded meekly. She stood across from me, staring at me directly in the eye.

‘I’m a big man.’

‘I’m a big man.’

‘But if I tell our secret to anyone else…’

‘But if I tell our secret to anyone else…’ I said, as I narrowed my eyes and added a furtive tinge to my voice. Yet she no longer smiled. In the darkness of her eyes, two slender, pitch black water snakes slithered in silvery sparkles.

‘May God turn me into a louse! The biggest louse ever!’ Su hollered, pompously stressing each word.

‘May God turn me into a louse!’ I hollered, pompously stressing each word. ‘The biggest louse ever!’

I jumped to my feet, assuming as fearsome an expression as possible, crossing my eyes, pushing my front teeth onto my lower lip like a vampire, jutting my jaw forward, making my hair stand up, my forehead all wrinkled, opening my nostrils wide and moving my eyebrows up and down. I had never attempted to imitate a louse before. I’d never realized how tough it could be! I did not have the foggiest idea what the faces of lice looked like. In point of fact, I could not even tell whether lice had faces or not. One of the few things I knew about lice was that they could be identified from afar, only from afar, as no one could tell what they looked like up close. Another thing: I also knew lice were petite enough not to be seen by the naked eye and evil enough not to display their eyes.

Mulling it over together we came up with further assumptions. Perhaps what rendered a louse so base and bad was its unique ability to become one with its victim. As such, a louse was not some sort of a foe lying in ambush outside, waiting for an occasion to assail, but rather an affliction that gnaws surreptitiously from within. The mosquito sucks our blood as well, for instance, but it leaves its victim alone once it finishes its job and has gotten what it hankered after. A mosquito, even at the instant it finds our vein, continues to be a part of the outside, never a part of us. So apparent is this detachment that even when we squish a mosquito that has just stung us, we are disgusted by the blood in our palms as if it was not ours but the mosquito’s. Nevertheless when it comes to lice exactly the reverse is true. The louse belongs not to the exterior but the interior, distinctively to us in person.

To picture it, I too tore a page from the lily-bedecked notebook. Since we could not figure out whether a louse had a face and, if it indeed had one, what it would look like, and since our only hint was that it stood out as the worst of the
worse, we could capture its monstrosity by borrowing a bit from each bad creature on earth and then bestowing upon it the imaginary body we had thus formulated. When I was done, what emerged was a real freak. Since it had borrowed each part of its body from a different creature, it resembled many life forms but did not look like any particular one of them. The eyes, one borrowed from a frog and the other an owl, appeared so strange together that it was as if it had been hit on the head with a sledgehammer. Below the page, I wrote, ‘Dazed Drunk Louse’ in small letters.

Su started to giggle as soon as she saw the picture. ‘Excellent! That’s exactly it. If you don’t keep your mouth shut, God will turn you into Dazed Drunk Louse!’ I tried to act as if I was scared but could not help laughing midway. She tried to act as if she was offended but could not help laughing midway.

Then abruptly, apprehensively, she stopped talking as if scolded by an invisible authority in the room. The vulnerability of someone who had just realized they had revealed things that could never be taken back cast a shadow over her juvenile face. It was only then that I had a sneaking suspicion that what she had told me could actually be true.

‘I told you not to give up hope in God, Loretta. My daughter, you should be grateful now that you have recovered your memory. You so much deserve to be happy,’ cooed the nurse to the woman who was about to be discharged.

‘It’s so strange,’ the other one smiled, opening wide the green eyes which she had made more dramatic with loads of even greener eye shadow. ‘What I most desired thus far was to remember my past, but now I want to escape from it. I’m going to start a new life nurse, and will never leave you from now on.’

‘See? Loretta will never leave us from now on,’ snorted His Wife Nadia to the bug struggling in the empty jelly jar she kept rotating in her palms. ‘Unlike you,
Blatella Germanica
, you were going to abandon us, weren’t you?’

Toward the end of last the century, on a dreary, hazy day in the middle of a dirty, muddy street, a scientist excitedly reported witnessing the en masse migration of a cockroach breed named
Blatella Germanica
. Of the migrating flock almost all were female and when Dr. Howard encountered them, they were in the process of leaving the restaurant they used to reside in, getting ready to cross the street. The migration of the bugs took approximately three hours, at which point they reached the place they would hereafter dwell in. When Dr. Howard started to question why these cockroaches had left the restaurant in the first place, he could not come up with a satisfactory answer. As much as one could observe, nothing
extraordinary had happened at the restaurant on that day; neither large-scale cleaning nor fumigating. There remained only one other factor that might have triggered the migration: overcrowding! For these female bugs to risk abandoning both their males and domicile even though no catastrophe had fallen upon them, it must have been crammed pretty tight back at that restaurant. Since hundreds had taken to the streets, there must be thousands left behind.

His Wife Nadia pensively pouted at the jar. How could so many
Blatella Germanica
– notorious for their deep dislike of daylight – keep appearing in the middle of the day at different corners of the house and particularly in the wardrobe where she kept her potato lamps? More significantly, did this obscured migration of flocks of cockroaches up and down the apartment building mean there could be hundreds or perhaps even thousands more someplace nearby?

As I was heating up the leftover pasta from the day before, the doorbell rang piercingly and persistently. I opened the door. I had never seen her like this.

‘I sure deserved this,’ she moaned. Swollen bags as red as raw meat had gathered under her eyes; the gleam of her young face had vanished along with the brilliance of her eyes and the lustre of her skin. The sides of her nose were so irritated from the constant wiping that they were peeling off. This was a strange face and since the Blue Mistress existed and subsisted with and within her face, she too was a strange woman now. Still waiting for the pasta to heat up, I held out my
rakι
to her. She refused to sip from my drink but waited patiently for me to swig half a glass before starting to speak.

‘He was going to come tonight,’ she sighed, ‘having sent me a message on the mobile phone. I made puréed eggplants. I was actually going to prepare chicken with ground walnuts but didn’t feel like it this time. I guess I was a bit offended. You know he hadn’t stopped by for ten days. That’s why I prepared the puréed eggplants. He likes that dish too, but not as much as the chicken with ground walnuts. All day long, I grilled eggplants.’

Stern as I stared at her, she did not even notice how uninterested I was in all these details. Hurrying full blast, as if someone might any minute declare her time was up, she sliced to shreds dozens of details each more meaningless than the one before and piled them all up in front of me. I did not intervene anymore.

‘He’s had a heart attack. Can you imagine? He had a heart attack on the way here,’ she cried out when she had finally finished with the dinner details. ‘They called from the hospital. I guess since mine was the last number on his mobile phone, they thought I was his wife or family.’

‘I’m sorry…’

As soon as she heard me, she started to choke and sob as if I had disclosed a long awaited decision in the negative. Perhaps she doubted the sincerity behind my words. Not that she would be wrong. The olive oil merchant, whom I had not met face to face and whom I passed judgement upon though I had seen him twice at most and only from a distance, was no more than a typecast for me: a hairy, greasy pitiable excuse of a rival with his belly hanging over his pants. I was sorry for my little lover more than him…and also somewhat surprised. Up until now I had not considered the possibility that she could have been so attached to that coarse figure of a man. That she loved to rat on him, did not object to and even enjoyed hearing me insulting him, was no indication that she was not attached to the man. Indeed she was more committed to him than I had ever suspected. I raked my fingers through her hair. Yet she harshly pushed away my hand.

‘You don’t understand,’ she snorted her disapproval. ‘It’s my fault. If the poor thing can’t make it through to the morning, it’s all because of me.’ She swallowed stiffly, as if trying to get rid of an acidic taste in her mouth. ‘I paid a visit to the saint.’

‘What did you do? What did you do?’

‘Well, you can’t actually call it paying a visit. Meryem put the idea into my head. There were a few bottles of banana liquor left in the house. I gave them to her a few days ago. I don’t drink the liquor and she likes them a lot. We were talking about whether it would be harmful to the baby and that kind of chit-chat. Thank goodness this time around her pregnancy is not as difficult. Meryem told me she lost three male babies before Muhammet, two were stillborn, one died when six months old. So when Muhammet was born, she let his hair
grow long like a girl. The kid went around like a girl until he started school, in order to trick
Azrael
.’