The Flea Palace Part 2

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. 'G.o.d 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, G.o.d 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 embarra.s.sment 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 G.o.d'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 pa.s.sageways 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 munic.i.p.ality 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 G.o.d's days. Their interest in garbage is hereditary, pa.s.ses 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 c.o.c.kroach. 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 c.o.c.kroach. 'It's actually very simple. Now, is there population planning in Turkey? No! Oh G.o.d 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?'

Celal coughed clumsily. Cemal had received the message, but preferring the interest of the Blue Mistress over the political correctness of his twin, he did not back down.

'Just this past month I personally confronted this woman. It was an afternoon like this one; late, we were fixing a bride's hair. The bride was on one side, the relatives of the bride on the other; the bun of one was finished and the other one had just been started. We'd been up all day long, totally beat. I looked outside and saw this woman coming again wobbling with garbage bags in her hand. I opened the windows, stuck my head out, waiting. "Maybe she'll be embarra.s.sed when she sees me and go back," I thought. No way! This creature of G.o.d came looking right into my eyes and still threw down her garbage. Oh, if I could only understand! Who declared our garden wall a dump? Who told these people, "Come throw your garbage in front of your neighbour's house?" The apprentices could barely hold me back. I was going to tear the woman to pieces. I lost it, I was hollering, hurling insults. You'd think a person would be a little embarra.s.sed and at least feel reluctant in front of all the people, right? Guess again! She stares at my face with a stupid naivety. I swear to G.o.d she didn't even understand why I was angry. She must've thought I'd escaped from a mental inst.i.tution. "Even if she doesn't understand, she'd probably be afraid to come again," I said to myself. Yet didn't she come again at the same time with the garbage in her hand? There she was, eyes wide open, fixed in an idiotic stare to see what I was going to do. She'll make a murderer out of me. Oh my beautiful G.o.d, one doesn't meddle in your business but why on earth do you create such people? Now what do we have to do to these bulgur, I don't know? Because of them, the apartment building is thick with the smell of garbage. The way things are going, no one will come in here. We'll lose our jobs, our daily bread. Child, spray a bit, okay?'

The sweet sugary perfume of the spray, with the picture of a deserted sh.o.r.e shadowed by palm trees and a turquoise sea, rained in particles on all corners of the shop and mixed with all the various smells. Cemal stole a glance at the c.o.c.kroach in the hope that it would be poisoned by the room spray. However, not only was it not at all affected by the particles landing on it, it had even succeeded in climbing up to the top of the pile of rollers and was now getting ready to move onto the Brilliantine box next to it.

'G.o.d knows you're right, all your customers would run away,' the high-strung brunette jumped in, as she watched the Number 113 burgundy nail polish that had already dried on her toes now being put on her fingers. 'Of course you've grown accustomed to the smell because you're here all day long. Sometimes when I enter this apartment building, I feel suffocated by it.'

'The windows are wide open all day long, the breeze blows pleasantly and still the smell does not go away. They say it increases as you go up to the higher floors. Is that so Madam Auntie?' shouted the manicurist causing the nail polish to overflow.

'And the bulgurs across from us claim we take their garbage. Now look here, are you crazy? What would I do with your disgusting garbage?' Cemal intervened and looked sharply at the manicurist so she would understand his discomfort about her asking questions of the old woman at every opportunity.

'How so? What does that mean?' asked the Blue Mistress taking a break from bemoaning her new image that had just started to appear on the mirror. Like many other women who witness even just the tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of their hair they had tried so hard to grow long, she too had already started to feel remorse even before getting up from the swivel chair.

'Oh, don't you know we're in dispute with the nutters at Number 4? And I thought there wasn't a person left who hadn't heard about it.' Cemal said. 'One day these people came and "Welcome!" I said, for why else does someone come to the beauty parlour? I thought they'd come to have their hair done, but apparently that wasn't their intention. This crazy woman in front, her stark raving mad husband behind her, their old maid older daughter next to them and the other old maid younger daughter behind them, all four of them were standing in front of me, out on a family campaign. First I didn't understand a thing from what they said. It turned out they'd tied up their garbage bags and placed them in front of their door and when they looked five minutes later, their garbage wasn't there! "Where's our garbage?" they said. "Meryem might've picked it up," I suggested. "No sir, the janitors had gone to their village that day." "The garbage men might have picked it up," I said. "What sort of a garbage man would enter the apartment building?" they retorted. "How would I know where your garbage is?" They obstinately maintained, "You took it, give our garbage back." What luck! Of all the places in Istanbul, we opened up a beauty parlour in an apartment building full of nutters!'

Absorbed in talking, Cemal suddenly realized he had moved away from his prey. Though he turned around scrutinizing the situation warily, the c.o.c.kroach was nowhere to be found.

'For goodness sake, whoever took the garbage bag, took it. What's the big deal?' muttered the high-strung brunette, lighting a new cigarette.

'Hey, the incident isn't as frivolous as you think,' stated Cemal as he looked under, around and in the vicinity of the basket of rollers. 'The man's a paranoiac. His wife is even worse. Who knows what scenarios they invented in their heads? Something like the CIA took the garbage bags or the terrorists kidnapped them, this was on the tip of my tongue but I swallowed it, "Now look here, who do you think you are to imagine you might have your garbage stolen?" How sad! Being a poor bulgur but thinking yourself a blessing like beans.'

The pimpled apprentice started to collect the teacups acc.u.mulated on the counter, each stained by different coloured lipsticks. As Cemal stared fixedly at each teacup fearing the c.o.c.kroach would emerge from under one of the saucers, his apprentice looked at the nipples of the Blue Mistress with a gaze just as fixed.

Since the Blue Mistress, finally rid of the plastic smock, was busy inspecting her new hair model, she was not aware of either the apprentice's looks or Cemal's anxiety. If only she could muster enough courage to one day have her hair cut very short...but the olive oil merchant would most certainly not approve of such a change. Far too many times he had said he liked hair long in a woman. G.o.d knows he was going to complain a lot at her tr.i.m.m.i.n.g her hair even this much. She looked at her watch. She was late, very late. She still had a lot of errands to run. Cemal was standing right behind her with a bristle brush in his hand, she thought the anxiety on his face was due to her not liking the haircut, and because she wanted to please him and had also decided she should say her 'goodbye' in the same way she had been greeted, she fervently shook his hand, violating the customer departure custom of a women's hairdresser.

The Blue Mistress's hand had still not left Cemal's when the outside door opened harshly once again. As the bell shook mightily, with the yell of the watermelon vendor at the corner, who now seemed determined to suppress his compet.i.tor with the loudspeaker, a woman plunged in dripping with agitation all over. All heads in the beauty parlour once again turned to the door to see the new addition to their ranks. They looked and were left dumbstruck, as if frozen stiff by a new command. The door closed and the last remaining echo of the bell stopped by itself as it reached the rest with a puny sound. The new customer was none other than Hygiene Tijen.

Flat Number 1: Musa, Meryem, Muhammet.

'No way, I won't go!' shouted Muhammet from where he had squeezed into. He then pounded his fist, as if it were responsible for all this, on the closest of the velvet sofas whose colour had first been egg yolk yellow, next sour cherry burgundy and then aquamarine, but now was ultimately a total mystery under these flowery covers. He would have preferred his kicks over fists, having lately made a habit of kicking everything he came across, but right at this instant the scrawny frame of his six years had been so tightly squeezed between the wall and the sofas that he was not even able to move his legs properly. Unable to free his body, he instead unleashed two of the longest barrages of swearwords he knew, tying one onto the tail of the other. Upon hearing him swear again, Meryem* pushed with her feet all of the three sofas that were lined-up and pinned her blasphemous son to the wall, in the meantime guarding her swollen belly with two hands. Now literally cornered, Muhammet turned red with anger and opened his mouth to swear anew but did not dare go that far. As surrendering to his mother without resistance was a wound to his pride, he angrily bit the side of the sofa that had started to hurt his waist. The flowery cover protected the chair from all such outside pressures but maybe he could leave teeth marks if he bit hard enough...

The history of this scuffle that was repeated every weekday morning went back exactly five months and one week to the enrollment of Muhammet into the 1-G section of the only elementary school in the neighbourhood. All he could remember from the first day of school was the anxious mothers', distressed children's and sulky teachers' faces. With time, the mothers' anxieties, the children's distress and even the teachers' sulkiness had abated bit by bit, yet all these bits, instead of scattering away to eventually disappear, had altogether been transferred to Muhammet. Hence after five months, one week to the day, Muhammet was an anxious, distressed, sulky child who still did not want to go to school.

His starting school had coincided with his mother's sofa obsession. Around that time, Meryem had somehow heard that her cousin's son who resided in an Aegean town by the coast and made a living by repairing boats like his father and grandfather before him, had decided out of the blue to settle in Istanbul and go into the furniture trade. Within thirty-six hours of hearing this news, Meryem had arrived at her cousin's workshop and placed an order for some furniture, the colour and style of which she had not discussed with anyone else. The agreement was as follows: the cousin's son, who had not yet received his first order, was going to give her a family discount and Meryem was going to hand over her old sofas and a minimal payment. The thing neither side knew at the time was that Meryem was three weeks pregnant. This bit of knowledge was not as irrelevant to the situation as it might seem at first glance. For as it had been observed when she was with Muhammet, pregnancy made Meryem rather stubborn, quite apprehensive and a little 'bizarre.' When the cousin's son had finished the sofa set, Meryem's pregnancy had progressed two months and was going strong.

When the time came, she went to the workshop to see the finished work, looked at the colour of the sofas and threw up. Egg yolk yellow! When even the thought of egg yolks was sufficient to make her feel like vomiting, it was out of question that the sofas she was going to put in the living room be egg yolk yellow. When the cousin's son tried to contain the situation by reminding her that it was she who had chosen this colour, Meryem could not help throwing up again. She threw up so many times before noon that finally she got her way. The new agreement was as follows: the cousin's son who had still not received his first order was going to change the colour of the upholstery and in return, Meryem would give both her old sofas and more money than they had initially discussed.

Meryem's pregnancy had reached its third month when the cousin's son notified her that the sour cherry burgundy sofa set was ready. In the meantime her morning sicknesses had considerably diminished. Now she instead suffered from schmaltziness. When the time came she went to the workshop to see the completed work, looked at the colour of the sofas and started to weep. Sour cherry burgundy! When even the image of a single sour cherry fallen from its tree was enough to remind her of untimely death, the possibility of the sofas in her living room being sour cherry burgundy could not be even brought up. When the cousin's son tried to defend himself and reminded her that she herself had chosen this colour, Meryem could not help weeping again. That afternoon she cried so much that she finally got her way. The new agreement was as follows: the cousin's son who had not yet received his first order was going to change the colour of the upholstery and in return, Meryem would give both her old sofas and twice the money they had initially agreed upon. Only this time the most innocuous of all colours was going to be selected to guarantee customer satisfaction: aquamarine!

It worked. Two weeks later, when Meryem saw the aquamarine sofas she neither vomited nor wept. That night the cousin's son slept peacefully for the first time in days. The following day, he threw the aquamarine sofa set in a pickup truck and brought it to Flat Number 1, Bonbon Palace, with two skinny porters he hired at the last minute as his big and burly apprentice had suddenly been taken ill. Meryem had been waiting for them excitedly since early morning with her ear on the doorbell and her hand on her not yet too swollen belly.

In the fully crowded living room that was already small and had become almost impossible to walk around, with the arrival of the new sofas, the porters and the cousin's son jumped over the coffee tables and perched on whatever they could find to drink a cup of coffee to take away their tiredness. Then it was time to leave. The cousin's son put in his pocket the agreed fee, and made each porter take a large piece of the old melon pink sofa set on their back, thus heading toward the door in a convoy. Unfortunately, they then had to stop abruptly before they could take even a single step. Such instances happen every so often on the road as well. You see the vehicle in front of you come to a sudden stop and know instantly that the road is jammed, but being unable to see what had happened ahead, you have no idea what the problem is and are forced to a standstill. The cousin's son and the porters, who were now doubled under the loads on their backs, were slightly more fortunate. Even though they did not know the 'whys and wherefores' of the jam, they could see the immediate cause. Meryem stood at the threshold with ill-omened glitters in her eyes, her heavy frame and large belly, which seemed to have grown even more in the last few minutes, blocking the exit and not letting them pa.s.s.

Her husband Musa was the first to grasp what Meryem's problem was. He drew to the side with silent resignation and started to fathom the course of events. Musa had an ulcer of the stomach. Whenever he became irritated, his stomach started to burn sourly. So he had found the road to a serene life in accepting his wife as she was. He was particularly determined to avoid conflicts with her during her pregnancy. Yet, since he felt pity for the porters, he deemed they should at least be provided with some sort of explanation for the situation they were in. He began by saying simply, 'She cannot give up her old sofas. She cannot, I know.'

In point of fact, this last 'I know' was some sort of a forewarning. It was like suggesting 'Why don't you simply give up while you are ahead of the game!' Yet neither the cousin's son nor the porters could get the message. Accordingly, they put the sofas down and started to argue forcefully. Their steadily swelling anger, however, did not do anything other than make Meryem embrace her cause even more fiercely. The melon pink sofas were indeed worn out but they had a common past with the family. The set had been bought when Meryem and Musa had finally moved out to their own house after spending five miserable years with the latter's mother and father. Muhammet's babyhood had been spent on them. The tiny pitch black hole at the corner of the double chair was a memento from the cigarette ash of a relative who had come to see the baby. That relative was no longer alive. Occasionally his scratchy voice smoked from the cigarette burn he had left behind. That is what the past was, that which you could not get rid of. The past did not resemble the crumbs spilled over a rug. You could not shake them out from open windows.

'Well, in that case, we're taking these new ones back,' said the cousin's son as he shouldered one of the aquamarine sofas. Taking his lead, the porters immediately reached for the other pieces of the set. Meryem looked at them with eyes filled with sheer sorrow like a small child witnessing the lamb she had lovingly fed for days now being taken away to be slaughtered. For the following hour, the cousin's son and the porters tried to persuade her in vain, the former furiously, the latter desperately, having now realized that they might not be paid in the end. Since it could not be decided which sofas were to go and which to stay, all throughout the steadfastly flaring dispute, everyone (except Musa) was left standing, which made them all (except Musa) even more likely to explode. Many times Meryem's eyes filled with tears, many times she felt nauseous. Considering her nausea, if not her tears, to be a message sent by the baby in her womb, 'See?' she asked, joining her hands on top of her belly, 'Even this unborn innocent's heart is not willing to let go of the sofas.' Joining her two skills to maximize power, she both cried and threw up so much that afternoon that by the end of the day the victory was Meryem's. The cousin's son was furious at himself for violating the oldest rule of trade history, 'Never conduct business with relatives,' and he and the porters, who were equally furious at him for his obvious failure, all left Flat Number 1, Bonbon Palace.

Even though indubitably victorious, an unexpected problem awaited Meryem. How they were going to place two separate sofa sets and their coffee tables simultaneously inside the already narrow janitor's flat with its low ceiling, was a challenge to the mind as well as being an eyesore but Meryem would not give up. Making use of every square centimetre available, she managed to make two three-seated, two double-seated and six single-seated sofas fit into the twenty-metre-squared living room by lining them up like a wagon with the coffee tables placed in between. Hence the largest mistake Muhammet had committed this morning when declaring to his mother his intention to not go to school was to take refuge behind one of these furniture wagons.

'You'll go whether you want to or not,' Meryem said as she continued to push the sofas with one foot and started preparing her son's lunch.

Once again she had made a toasted-cheese sandwich with a slice of white cheese, a slice of tomato and three sprigs of parsley in between. Depending on the day, she also put in a single fruit and just enough money, no more no less, to buy one bottle of b.u.t.termilk drink which Muhammet bought from the school canteen. Toasted-cheese sandwiches were prepared at the school canteen too and they were definitely much better and warmer than the home-made version, but even though he had told his mother over and over again not to prepare a toasted-cheese sandwich, not once had he been able to make her listen to him. If only she could be prevented from putting the tomato in and, if not that, at least the parsley, as he could not understand what that was doing there anyway. However, whenever Meryem had her mind set on something, oblivious to all stimuli pointing in the opposite direction, she would simply hide like a sea-creature in the deaf silence of a cave, refusing to come out until the other side had totally given up. It was simply impossible for her to veer-off from these things she had learned at who-knows-what stage of her life: that toasted-cheese sandwiches, for example, were to be prepared with a slice of tomato and three sprigs of parsley. That is what she had been doing every morning for the last five months and one week, and today was no exception. Muhammet, however, felt as if it was not only this tomato and parsley that he carried to school every day, but also his mother's eye and ear. Should he ever not eat his sandwich or commit the much worse crime of skipping school, he somehow felt sure that this red eye of the tomato and green ear of the parsley would immediately break the news to his mother.

Until school started, it was not with fear but with love that he took pieces of bread into his hands. In those days, the two noses of the breakfast bread belonged to him. As Meryem gave the noses to her son, she did not neglect to take off the small piece of paper attached to either one or the other of the noses. She told Muhammet that this notched piece of paper was a letter from the baker's daughter. The letter would be made to wait on the side until he had finished off his breakfast. Only then would Muhammet have gained the right to learn what was written in it. To that end, he would eat without any fuss. Even though he was forced to finish one boiled egg every morning, for the sake of reading the letter, he would complete his breakfast without a peep. And when the time came, Meryem took mischievous pleasure in clearing the table as slowly as possible to increase her son's curiosity, then poured herself a cup of tea and started to read, dissolving the words slowly in her mouth like a lump of sugar.

The baker's daughter was a lonely child; she had no friends or siblings. While her father baked bread at night, she would sit alone in between the flour sacks and secretly write a letter to Muhammet. Her mother had died while she was still a baby and her father had remarried. The step-mother constantly tormented this tiny orphan because she had a stone instead of a heart. The poor girl escaped from the house at every opportunity to spend time at the bakery with her dear father. Sweet-smelling soft breads were prepared at the bakery, also crisp simits. As Meryem kept reading these, it never occurred to Muhammet to wonder how so much information fitted onto a piece of paper that was only one times three centimetres-squared. In the universe of nought-to-one years, bread was sacred and every piece of paper with writing on it remained an absolute mystery; as the abstruse magic of the two met on the nose of the bread, the baker's daughter would shimmer under a halo of sheer enchantment.

Muhammet wanted to learn everything about her: what the bakery looked like, what she did there, if she liked to sleep in the morning and be up at night when all children her age had to go to bed early, the games she played and, most of all, whether she was beautiful or not... Meryem described the girl as 'blonde and as delicate as a water lily that blooms in the water.' She kept her hair long. It reached her waist on each side in two braids. Muhammet, too, had long hair then. Those who saw him on the street thought he was a girl.

In her letters, the baker's daughter mostly talked about the people who stopped by the bakery all day long. Old people came, leaning on their canes; they dipped the hard biscuits they bought in their teas and dissolved them noisily in their toothless mouths. There were also the simit sellers, who came early every morning with round wooden trays on their heads. The baker's daughter wanted to be friends with them but some behaved rudely toward her and said impolite things. Still, there were some among them with hearts of gold. For instance, there was a freckled boy who could hop on one foot while whirling in each hand simits put onto two thin sticks. Muhammet was offended at the baker's daughter talking so frequently about the talents of this boy but wouldn't object. Then there were the pastry-sellers who stopped by with their hand carts. There were also women who came by to have pita-bread made at the bakery. They treated the baker's daughter well. They would always give her a pita before carrying their heavy trays back home. The baker's daughter would write these things at length, Meryem would read them one by one, time would flow by at a snail's pace. This halcyon innocence was going to be, however, roughly smashed to pieces in the fall when Muhammet was registered to the 1-G section of the neighbourhood's only elementary school. First his hair was cut. Now n.o.body could say he looked like a girl. Then the breakfasts got shorter, and after some time, he learned how to read and write. It was then that he had discovered those tiny papers stuck on each bread were actually the labels of the bakeries and there were no letters coming from the baker's blonde daughter. Since then, there were no more letters left to be read, nor that moon-faced girl to love. To learn to read was to lose forever the mystery of writing.

'No way, I won't go!' Muhammet yelled shrilly, unable to take his eyes off the lunch bag, but his voice was much weaker this time and within a couple of minutes, when Meryem heard a crushed moan like that of a puppy, she knew her son had given up and stopped pushing the sofa. As he emerged from his corner crestfallen, Muhammet threw his mother a vinegary glance.

Next to the huge frame of his mother, he was tiny like one of the dots on the letter 'o'. When his sibling was born, s/he would be the other dot. Even though Muhammet was only six years old and knew all kids his age were smaller than their mothers, unlike other kids, he had long known and accepted that he would always be smaller than his mother no matter how much he grew up, whatever age he reached, whichever unattainable future he accomplished. His mother, with her wide forehead that wrinkled up when angry, her round face with rosy cheeks ama.s.sed, her huge hazel eyes that grew wide when stubborn, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s swollen like balloons, her dimpled arms, her chubby flesh bulging from her thighs, her feet as big as a child's grave and her endless superst.i.tious beliefs and unbelievable energy were all so big as to totally crush every obstacle into dust...and would always remain so...

Hence he put his toasted sandwich with parsley into his lunch bag, stepped on the flattened corpse of the c.o.c.kroach he had crushed just this morning at the corner of the aquamarine double chair and, dragging his feet, set out on his way to school.

Flat Number 4: The Firenaturedsons.

Upon entering Bonbon Palace, the inhabitants of the flat on the right, like all family residences on the ground floor, complained about being in front of people's eyes too much. All day long, the residents of the building and their guests of all kinds, as well as the door-to-door salesmen who always failed to read the written sign strictly forbidding their presence, could not help stealing a glance through the living room windows of Flat Number 4. With the snooping customers of the beauty parlour across from them added to all these people, the glances aimed at infiltrating the living room via its windows increased ten fold as did the anxiety of those inside.

Some of the families living on the ground floor might eventually get used to such traffic. There are even several among them who made the most of the situation of being continuously watched from the outside by continuously watching the outside in return some sort of 'an eye for an eye' policy! Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the most well-informed peeping-toms of apartment buildings usually reside in flats at the entrance level...but the Firenaturedsons were not of this type. They could neither tolerate being seen by those coming to the apartment nor intended to spy on them. In their view, the world outside their house was a boundless terrain of everlasting trepidation. In point of fact, when the 'surname law' was promulgated in Turkey, if rather than letting each family make the choice, their characteristics were taken into account, the doorbell of Flat Number 4 would have read 'Everlastingtrepidationsons' rather than 'Firenaturedsons'.

All day long the wide windows of the flat were tightly covered with different yet similarly impenetrable armour first with cambric, then a sunshade of white cotton calico when the sun was up. Once it started to get dark outside, the thick velvet curtains of the same ashen-colour as the apartment building were drawn all the way across. It was then that the living room windows of Flat Number 4 hid from and guarded against the eyes of the outside world, like a vigilant animal camouflaging itself in the colour of the surrounding soil to avoid being noticed by its enemies. Still, even when all three drapes of cambric, sunshade and velvet curtains were fully drawn, there remained a sliver of light on the right. There at that corner sat fifty-six year old Ziya Firenaturedsons, who had planted himself at that spot ever since the day he was dismissed from the State Water Works for taking bribes. While reading the papers and watching television, drinking coffee and eating pumpkin dessert, he would occasionally peep from this sliver with great caution and case the surroundings with anxious and suspicious eyes, without quite knowing what to look for or why. At those rare moments when Ziya Firenaturedsons got up from his sofa, the retired, organic-chemistry teacher, fifty-five year old Zeren Firenaturedsons would replace him. She too would look out from the opening once in a while, but did so less to look outside than to check on the canary in its cage next to the window. The fact that this canary, unlike the preceding one, hadn't chirped even once, was a burning concern for Zeren Firenaturedsons. She kept saying she had to open the window for the canary to chirp but never found the courage to do so. The memory of that cursed morning when she found her first canary in its cage covered with blood was still too fresh in her mind. Though the criminals behind that deed had vanished when the wretched man called the 'Cat Prophet' had moved away from Bonbon Palace (taking all his stuff and entire tribe of cats with him) given all the street cats that roamed around wagging their tails, she worried to this day about the odds that her new canary would meet a similar end. She was particularly suspicious of that tar-coloured, grim-faced giant of a cat, with fur so fluffy it seemed it had skinned and donned the furs of at least four cats.

Actually Zeren Firenaturedsons did not have the slightest interest in either canaries or any other bird of breed until Zekeriya Firenaturedsons (thirty-three years old) broke his nose for the fourth time. A long time ago, when her son's nose was a pleasant protrusion on a soft cartilage that had not yet found its form, life was so nice and uncomplicated. Then, as he stepped into adolescence, the gentle curves of his baby face were totally wiped away and his nose somehow underwent an unexpected change, first insolently growing longer and then curving down. All the meanwhile Zeren Firenaturedsons had anxiously watched this transformation as if following the approach of a menacing stranger. She was very content with her own delicate nose; her husband's, though it might not be regarded as beautiful, was at least well-shaped. Given these facts, Zeren Firenaturedsons felt the need to climb further up the family tree as she firmly believed that all types of flaws in the world stemmed from the genes. In this vein, when she painfully realized that her son's nose had completed its transformation and would never again be as before, she started to search with a gene-map in her hand to at least find out the person responsible for this mishap. Going back systematically step by step, concentrating more on her husband's lineage than hers, she first reviewed the relatives she knew and when that did not turn anything up, combed through the old alb.u.ms one at a time, only to return from her countless trips to the genemap empty handed. With time, she gave up the search.

Then Zekeriya turned fourteen and smashed his nose to pieces when he took wings with the speed of p.u.b.erty and flew down a hill on his bicycle. Upon receiving the news, Zeren Firenaturedsons felt a relief she could not confess to anyone. Despite her hopes that this unfortunate accident would be a new beginning, setting straight not only her son's nose but also his behaviour, everything had got worse afterward. With surgery, the cursory performance of which was quickly revealed, the nose that was already rather ugly achieved a hopeless crookedness and stayed this way. Curiously, Zekeriya's turn toward bent-and-twisted ways occurred around the same time. In the ensuing years, Zekeriya Firenaturedsons would part at every opportunity from the straight and narrow road his mother had placed him on, plunging one by one into all the turns he could find and continuously losing his way until he finally emerged a total source of embarra.s.sment and torment. The year he broke his nose, he started to steal money from his parents; at age fifteen to dedicate his spare time to masturbation, at sixteen to see school as an arena where he could trample on the weak, at seventeen to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day and at eighteen decided to 'make it' in the quickest way possible, thereby sticking the nose that increasingly irritated his mother into every kind of filth that he could sniff out. When the outcome of his second nose operation was even worse than the first, Zeren Firenaturedsons' worries about her son peaked to the highest point while her expectations plunged.

With the strength Zekeriya collected during convalescence, at twenty-two he got mixed up with various parking-lot mafia, at twenty-three he became infatuated with a divorced bank clerk with two kids, at twenty-four he stabbed the bank security officer his former lover had sent after him and got arrested, at twenty-six he took a nasty revenge against life by breaking the nose of the president of the a.s.sociation to Beautify Kuzguncuk (who had started to organize the neighbourhood inhabitants into a protest group against the construction of a parking lot in the back garden of an Ottoman mansion), at twenty-seven he went into hiding from his family, then, at twenty-eight, after the discovery of his hiding place, he was hurriedly married off to a relative's daughter the family elders had found suitable and produced a child that same year. Yet, according to the account of his willowy wife who often came round to the Firenaturedsons' flat to complain in tears, marriage had not straightened out his habits one little bit. Not that he wandered around outside day and night like before, but he had turned instead into a highly irritable nervous wreck. At the end of one of these nervous breakdowns, he had 'roughed up' an inexperienced woman driver who had b.u.mped into his car at an orange traffic light, and after a terrible beating from the brawny husband the following day, had his nose rearranged once again.

During this time, Zeren Firenaturedsons had eagerly awaited the baby her daughter-in-law was pregnant with. For babies who are conceived when a conjugal relationship stumbles coming to term while the marriage is still unable to get up from where it had fallen flat on its face are like cement sacs: tiny cement sacs that plaster the visible cracks, keep the columns of the nest bound and fortify those marriages which are on the brink of collapse. When Zekeriya's baby was born, like every cement sac, it too had a mission, a double one: to prevent the destruction of first his father's nose and then his marriage.

It worked, at least for a while. Exactly one year and five and a half months pa.s.sed without any incidents. Then came the shocking news which shocked no one. While carrying the baby carriage around in the house, Zekeriya had fallen down the landing of the stairs. Fully prepared to encounter the same scene for the fourth time, each more annoying but much less moving, Zeren Firenaturedsons went to the hospital her daughter-in-law had named on the phone in between sobs. She angrily stormed into the room and looked in bewilderment at her son who stood in front of her in excellent condition. A nose had indeed been broken in the accident at the house, only this time not Zekeriya's but that of the little one sleeping in the carriage sent down the landing. Upon detecting the bandages she had grown accustomed to seeing for years, right in the middle of her son's face, which she every time interpreted as a rebel flag waved against her rule, now being transferred to her grandchild's face, Zeren Firenaturedsons was convinced that there had been a grave genetic transfer somewhere and this defect would never be corrected. There and then she gave up all hope about her son and his bloodline.

The first thing she did when she returned to Bonbon Palace in hopelessness, was to shut herself in her bedroom and reorganize the drawer of the chestnut wardrobe in which she had kept her son's baby belongings. After all, whenever we decide to no longer love someone, we must first work out what to do with the belongings we have of theirs. Yet since Zeren Firenaturedsons could never and would not ever discard anything related to her family, the most severe course of action she could manifest was emptying out all her son's belongings to thoroughly examine each and every item before putting it away once again. As she went through the entire chestnut wardrobe, the culprit gene she had sought for years suddenly appeared inside an old etiquette book jammed behind one of the bottom drawers. A photograph had been wedged, who knows when and by whom, in the 'How does one talk to an unfamiliar lady in a train compartment?' section of the book that had an ill.u.s.tration on every page. The answer Zeren Firenaturedsons was dying to find out was hidden in this faded photograph. For the fourth male brother of her husband's grandfather the effeminate, coquettish, worthless one who had constantly relayed gossip from one person to another and been primarily responsible for so many family fights so as to be remembered by all as 'Hoopoe' also had a nose exactly like Zekeriya's. In the photograph taken in his later years, HoopoeHamdi, with a fedora on his head, a rather long cigarette holder in his hand, and smoking a cigarette while gazing dreamily into the distance over the shoulders of the family members, had given his profile to the camera as if to better highlight the ugliness of his nose. Zeren Firenaturedsons was not interested in the fact that the family dictionary had made a basic mistake, in that the bird called Hoopoe had never relayed gossip to anyone except when taking news from the prophet Suleiman to Belkis. The only thing that interested her was the man carrying this nickname. It was a terrible injustice that her one and only son, her firstborn, had seized, rather than those of his own father and mother, the nose of a senile elderly man whom he had not once met in his life and who possessed the most despicable genes in the whole family. What was even more terrible was the link of her one and a half year old grandchild to the same genetic chain.

With a sudden impulse, she upped and threw this ugly doc.u.ment and the etiquette book into the garbage. And in spite of the many complaints of the apartment administrator Hadji Hadji concerning the putting out of trash at inappropriate times and thus rendering the apartment's entrance an eyesore, she put the yellow garbage bag outside her front door.

Five, ten, thirteen...exactly seventeen minutes later, Zeren Firenaturedsons felt a deep remorse. Within a minute, it occurred to her that having until today carefully collected everything she had concerning her family, she should certainly have saved this old photograph regardless of its unpleasantness. When she reopened the door, however, the garbage bag had vanished. A story she had once heard from her mother suddenly came to mind. Her father and mother had placed the cat they had kept at home for years but no longer wanted into a sack, and had driven out as far as they could to leave this sack in some desolate field outside the city. Upon returning home at night, they had found the cat in front of the house indolently waiting for them. Now, as she looked at the empty s.p.a.ce left by the garbage bag, Zeren Firenaturedsons caught the cold shudder her own mother had felt upon seeing that tabby in front of her. For the disappointment of seeing how something we thought we had gotten rid of has stuck to us, and the disappointment in observing how something we suppose we could get back anytime has slid away from our hands, are actually reminiscent of one another.

Similar things had happened in this apartment building; garbage bags were mysteriously taken away from doors before Meryem had a chance to collect them. Yet since those bags had been of little concern to Zeren Firenaturedsons, the riddle of who took them and with what purpose had never intrigued her. Now she wanted her garbage back. Suddenly in her mind's eye the lost garbage bag turned into a sealed letter one that was so personal it should never be seen by strangers. Our garbage is private as long as it is still in front of our door: it belongs to us, is about us. The moment it ends up in the garbage can, it becomes anonymous. Those who make a living from garbage can stick their fingers into the cans in the middle of the street or in the garbage piles that rise up at certain corners or in the dumps near the city, but only when they dare to open or even worse kidnap the garbage in front of our door, is it considered an invasion of privacy.

In the following hour, Zeren ran up and down Bonbon Palace looking everywhere she could think of, getting suspicious of everyone. At one point, guessing that the garbage bags in front of each door could all end up in the same place like streams that all flow into the same river, she went outside and rummaged through the garbage pile acc.u.mulating by the garden wall; but the ground had split open and the yellow garbage bag tied with a bow had slid within. Since the janitors were away visiting their village, only one possibility remained: the beauty parlour across from them! Yet she returned from her exploratory visit there with her husband and daughters empty handed and with shot nerves. As if it was not enough for the garbage bag to vanish with the photograph of Hoopoe Hamdi, she had received on top of it a bunch of insults from that shrew of a hairdresser Cemal.

It was some time after that incident that Zeren Firenaturedsons purchased a canary. Before the canary however, there had been fish of all colours and sorts...

Actually, Zeren Firenaturedsons hadn't the slightest interest in fish until the day when she finally accepted after many denials that her older daughter had neuropathy. She loved her older daughter; at one time she had loved her more than anything else. In the days when her son started to follow that crooked nose of his, she in turn had started to pour all her attention and love onto her older daughter. Back then, just as today, Zeynep Firenaturedsons (now thirty-one) was far more active and outgoing than either of her siblings. At age eleven, she wanted to be the princ.i.p.al at the school her mother worked at, a firefighter to spray all the water of the State Water Works where her father worked, b.u.m-around like her brother, crochet lace like her younger sister and become an actor like the father of her best friend at school all at the same time. Little had changed at age twenty-one. She still wanted to be more than the sum of everyone around her. Pulling the day apart into chunks of time and squeezing a separate occupation into each chunk, she had divided herself into many pieces, doing first one thing then another and, strangely enough, succeeding in most of them. Her intelligence was sharp enough to flatter her mother's genetic pride. Yet, she was just as unhappy. Whatever she possessed was far from being sufficient, in fact, nothing was sufficient. There was not a single thing in life that was complete; to her 'completeness' was just a hollow word in dictionaries. There was no sea, for instance; even within one sea, there were an infinite number of seas each one trying to flow in another direction. The height and frequency of the waves we saw reaching the sh.o.r.e was what remained of inter-sea wars. They arrived only to be decimated bubble by bubble, particle by particle. Likewise, there was no Istanbul. There were tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of groups, communities and societies. The 'pluses' took away the 'minuses', opposite winds prevented each other's drift and because no one group was strong enough to dominate another, the city managed in the end to preserve itself though it could not help being constantly diminished in the process. Just like the waves, Istanbul was what remained from the total: from what the rats nibbled on, the seagulls picked to shreds, the inhabitants shed, the cars wore out, the boats carried, the very first air breathed in by all, G.o.dknowshowmany babies born every hour...the remnants scattered and shattered, always lacking, never to be completed... Zeynep Firenaturedsons was twenty-two when she had her first breakdown.

Zeren Firenaturedsons was not at all affected by what the physician said as she took neither the physician nor his words seriously. There was no leaf on any branch of the family tree where one would come across such a disease. The mind of even the darkest blot, Hoopoe Hamdi was in excellent condition. That aside, her older daughter was the smartest, brightest one among her three children. The crisis she went through could be nothing more than late p.u.b.erty despair.

Zeynep Firenaturedsons' quick recovery convinced her mother further that she had been right. Yet, as it soon became evident, this recovery was not permanent but temporary. From then on life for the older daughter of the Firenaturedsons would be divided into two seasons: when she was sick, it was as if she would never recover from her illness, yet when she was well, it seemed as if she would never be ill again. There was no middle ground. No one could tell when she would make the transition from one state to the other. The most evident difference between the two states was her reaction to bad news. When sick, she would only be interested in certain items of news, like a colour blind person only notices certain colours, and she would read the newspapers for this type of news. Street children who got high on paint-thinners, honour crimes, suicides, women forced into prost.i.tution, suicide bombers, babies kidnapped from hospitals, youths taking overdoses, all sorts of tragic occurrences... In addition to the papers, she also carefully searched through the community news: uncovered sewer pits, burst water pipes, uncollected garbage, closed roads, ferocious pickpockets, pastry shops sealed up for filth, butchers selling horse meat, grocers marketing contraband detergent, parking lot gangs, old wooden houses mysteriously destroyed by fire, gas explosions, gas leaks... Unsatisfied with simply following this maddening news, Zeynep Firenaturedsons loved to relate in fullest detail each and every item to whomever she came across. Since she did not come across many people, as she spent most of her time at home with her mother, she recounted the same stories over and over to the latter. When she was well, however, she skipped the amply ill.u.s.trated news of doom. She was, subsequently, the only one among the Firenaturedsons who read the newspapers consistently.

Whenever the excited voice of her older daughter talking about catastrophes grated on her nerves, Zeren Firenaturedsons listened to the peaceful bubbling sound of the aquarium she had filled with colourful fish and phosph.o.r.escent accessories. Before the fish, however, there had been decorative plants of all kinds...

At twenty-three, Zelish Firenaturedsons was neither a b.u.m like her brother, nor as intelligent as her sister. Actually, just as one could not say that since childhood she had looked like the other members of her family, neither could it be said that she was like them in type or disposition and this difference became most striking when compared to her sister. Like a bulky, plump mushroom somehow grown next to a wild, rough plant with flowers that soothe the eye, and inured to the plant so as to suck all its sun and water, Zelish had attached herself to her sister perching on a corner of her life. She was mediocre and hesitant, lazy and inadequate. It was as if seeing her sister incessantly swing between two poles, intelligent and attractive at times, nutty and weepy at others, had confused her so badly that she had decided instead to stop somewhere in between, at a secure threshold. While her brother craved 'to be something', her sister 'to be everything', she for years had only wanted 'not to be'.

Among the Firenaturedsons, Zelish was the one least resistant to anxiety. For other family members, anxiety consisted of a menace coming from the outside. Even though its causes varied, the address remained constant and the world remained outside the thick, velvet, ashen curtains. Where that world was involved, each had their own concerns. Ziya Firenaturedsons was most apprehensive that the bribery trial would reopen to lead to his imprisonment, followed by his appearing in all the newspapers and becoming the talk of the town. The major anxiety of Zeren Firenaturedsons was her children, and after that came, in the following order: the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, being attacked by pickpockets on the streets and another earthquake in Istanbul. For his part, Zekeriya Firenaturedsons mostly feared failing in bed, being powerless in life, the people to whom he had gambling debts and, finally, fear itself. As for Zeynep Firenaturedsons, she was a pendulum that carelessly swung between fountains of apprehensiveness-anxiety-fear and fearless-carefree-untroubled seas.

Yet for Zelish Firenaturedsons, anxiety was something abstract. It was everywhere like air and almost as intangible: with causes far harder to identify than the reopening of a bribery case, being nailed because of a gambling debt or the coming to power of fundamentalists. To start with, anxiety was not external to a person but rather the very fauna in which s/he lived. For fear and anxiety and worry are nourished by 'the horror of the probability that everything could turn out to be different.' (Here are your house, friends, body, family...These are yours, but unfortunately they could all be taken away from you one day!) As for apprehension, that is fed by 'the horror of the probability that nothing could be any other way.' (Here are your house, friends, body, family... These are yours, and unfortunately could always remain the same!) When she was in middle school Zelish had been to her friends' houses a few times. These visits, which gave her the opportunity to see up-close mothers, fathers and families not at all like her own, were a turning point for her, as until then she had thought 'mother', 'father' and 'family' meant basically a carbon copy of the ones she had. The embarra.s.sment she felt about her family grew over the years in folds like the interest rate of a slyly increasing fine.

The hesitant syllables of the stuttering physicist in the schoolroo