The Flea Palace (53 page)

Truth is a horizontal line. Be it a hotel corridor, hospital ward, rehabilitation centre or train compartment; all are horizontal. In such places, all your neighbours are lined up next to you on a horizontal plane, for a fleeting moment. You cannot grow
roots at these places. Horizontality is the haven of evanescence. I too have been living on a horizontal line for sixty-six days – in the seventh of the ten cells lined up next to each other here.

Lies are a vertical line. An apartment building, for instance, erected with flats on top of one another with two layers of cemeteries underneath and seven planes of skies above. Here you can spread roots and grow branches as you please. Verticality is the shelter of permanence, a tribute to immortality.

Bonbon Palace is an apartment building constructed on an area of cemeteries. A vertical line that ascends floor by floor. It is my lie. For I am narrating these stories not from a flat there, but from the prison.

When on the 1st of May a group of revolutionaries impatiently decided to break through the police barricade, I was among them. When we were all detained and thrust in a police bus, I chanced to sit beside a ginger-haired, flap-eared, funny-faced man who did not at all show his age. I am grateful to him as that day on that bus, seeing the fear in his widely opened eyes enabled me to forget my own. While we were taken to the police headquarters, he kept whining, whimpering and wailing that he had no interest in politics, that all he did in life was to fumigate bugs. That man was telling the truth. He was indeed a bug fumigator and had probably never hated his job as much as he had done then. His name was not Injustice; that I made up myself. The name is not entirely bogus, however, for he looked like someone who had seen plenty of injustice in life; besides, his surname is true. He was released the same day anyhow. They released him, but arrested me.

Ever since I came here, I have not spent a single day without thinking of Injustice Pureturk. It’s all because of these bugs. I happen to be a radical with a deep fear of insects. Unfortunately there are too many of them here, especially cockroaches. I hear them in the toilets, air vents and even the dents and crevices in the walls. They keep scurrying around and encouraged by darkness, incessantly multiply…but I can assure you that the louse is the very worst…

No doubt, in order to observe all of these creatures better, you should come visit me and spend some time here. If you have no time, however, you ought to be content with my version of the story. Yet I too, ultimately speak only in my own voice. Not that I’ll foist my own views onto what transpires but I might, here and there, solder the horizontal line of truth to the vertical line of deception in order to escape the wearisome humdrum reality of where I am anchored right now. After all, I am bored stiff here. If someone brought me the good news that my life would be less dreary tomorrow, I might feel less bored today. Yet I know only too well that tomorrow will be just the same and so will the succeeding days. Nevertheless, I should not give you the impression with my fondness of circles that it is only my life that persistently repeats itself. In the final instance, the vertical is just as faithful to its recurrence as the horizontal. Contrary to what many presume, that which is called ‘Eternal Recurrence’ is germane less to circles than to lines and linear arrangements.

I cooked up this story basically to overcome my bug phobia. Dreaming of a surreptitiously garbage-collecting old widow in some vertical world helped me to survive better the horizontal line here of cells next to one another. Still, I cannot be regarded as having entirely lied. If anything, I can be accused of merging the truth with lies. Of returning to the beginning rather than reaching a decisive end.

As for me, I will not be staying in this prison too long. The sentence they deemed fit for me is one year and two months. Sixty-six
days of that sentence are already over. Of these sixty-six days, I passed the first week by getting used to my place and fearing the bugs, and passed the rest trying to forget my fear by way of making up the story you read. Now that the circle of the greyish tin lid of garbage has stopped turning, I frankly do not know how I am going to spend the remaining three hundred and sixty days here.

However, as soon as I am released, the very first thing I want to do is pay a visit to Injustice Pureturk. The first bug fumigator in Turkey taken into custody for being a revolutionary. Life is absurd, at its core lies nonsense, and if you ask me, Fortuna must be long fed up with tackling the possible answers to the impossible question: ‘What will happen to whom when?’

Not too much to ask, is it? It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, Managing Director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks – the same choice faced every day by the vast majority of readers, few of whom could afford hardbacks. Lane’s disappointment and subsequent anger at the range of books generally available led him to found a company – and change the world.

We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it’
Sir Allen Lane, 1902–1970, founder of Penguin Books

The quality paperback had arrived – and not just in bookshops. Lane was adamant that his Penguins should appear in chain stores and tobacconists, and should cost no more than a packet of cigarettes.

Reading habits (and cigarette prices) have changed since 1935, but Penguin still believes in publishing the best books for everybody to enjoy.We still believe that good design costs no more than bad design, and we still believe that quality books published passionately and responsibly make the world a better place.

So wherever you see the little bird – whether it’s on a piece of prize-winning literary fiction or a celebrity autobiography, political tour de force or historical masterpiece, a serial-killer thriller, reference book, world classic or a piece of pure escapism – you can bet that it represents the very best that the genre has to offer.

www.penguin.co.uk

Join the conversation:

Twitter
                  
Facebook

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England

Penguin Group (USA), Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)