The Flea Palace Part 3

As the curtains of Flat Number 4 blocked off the sun's rays, these decorative plants withered away one by one just like the glances of strangers. The fish in the aquarium also suffered huge losses over time. The canary was ma.s.sacred by the tribe of the Prophet of Cats. Although there was a new canary in the same cage now, for some inexplicable reason, it had not chirped even once.

Flat Number 3: Hairdressers Cemal and Celal.

Upon seeing their all time favourite subject of gossip walk in, the people in the beauty parlour had plunged into the uneasy silence that is typical of those caught in the act. Encountering right in front of your eyes the person you were ruthlessly gossiping about a minute previously might lead you to suspect something mysterious is going on. Likewise, it seemed to the people inside as if Hygiene Tijen had heard the mention of her name from the spirit world. Still the reason for the nervousness they felt in front of her, did not solely stem from their inability to figure out how to straighten the facial expressions they had so carelessly slackened while gossiping. They were equally bewildered at seeing a person who had not stepped out of her house for months now, visiting a place that was probably one of the last locations on her 'list of potential places to stop by if and when the time is ripe enough to step out one day.'

The first to shake off this immobility was Cemal. He headed towards the door, saying in an almost merry voice, 'Welcome, come on in, Misses Tijen!' without even noticing how impolite it was for him to address by name someone he had not once before met. Such are the side effects of gossip addiction: if you wag your tongue too much and too often about someone, you might may well start to believe that you have known them personally for quite some time. Had Cemal's intimacy been reciprocated even the tiniest bit, he might have gotten so carried away with this delusion that he could have even reproached Hygiene Tijen, as he did to his regular customers, for not coming more often...but that did not happen. Giving him a once over from top to toe with a coldness that revealed she was not at all thrilled with this greeting, the woman facing him turned her head without saying anything and started to scrutinize everything. Her eyes got stuck one by one on the shorn hair on the ground waiting to be swept away, the threadbare towels that had lost their colour from frequent washing, the stains on the leopard-patterned plastic smocks tied to the necks of the customers, the thin crack on the wall-to-wall mirror, the dead mosquitoes lying around the edge of the counter adjacent to the mirror, the dust on the shelf lined up with boxes of the same brand hair gel, hair foam and brilliantine, hair-b.a.l.l.s jammed in the hair brushes, the filling that was sticking out of the tears on the chairs, the shabbiness of the furniture and the bubbly water with doubtful contents on the three-layered manicure cart. The dissatisfaction she felt at what she saw was so deep and her desire to immediately leave the premises so evident, that Cemal, who felt both the place he worked in and himself demeaned, swallowed back all the cries of greeting that were on the tip of his tongue and was reduced to silence.

However, Hygiene Tijen did not, as Cemal had feared, turn her back and run away. After standing stock-still for a few seconds unable to move as if nailed to the spot, she cut her scrutiny halfway along so as not have to witness any further the hideous and slovenly world surrounding her and slid her looks outside the open window. There she saw her cleaning lady who had come down to the garden to collect the clothes. The woman, whose displeasure at being forced to collect so many clothes so meaninglessly thrown down could be read from her bleary eyes, had seen her at the same moment. Her nerves shot from cleaning all day long, she was so tired that she did not even have the energy to wonder what Tijen was doing down here. Leaving the laundry basket heaped up with clothes on the ground and with her elfin body remaining out in the garden, she slipped her head covered with a mildewed lemon headscarf inside the window of the beauty parlour and murmured in a dead beat voice: 'I'm going Misses Tijen, I've got a family to look after.' But even she had trouble making a connection between the situation and the words that had left her mouth, for she felt the need to add some sort of an explanation: 'This is the last basket, I gathered them all. I'll take it up right now and leave it in the house. I've already been up and down five times. Don't wait for me on Thursday. This neighbourhood is out of the way for me anyhow.'

Slightly crossing her eyebrows, Tijen gave a silent nod of approval. Even though her turbid facial expression did not reveal what she was thinking, the distress she felt at being here among people she did not know was too evident. She remained standing like that until Celal, eager to save her from this torture, drew near to mend the bridge his twin had tried to build but had smashed-up instead, and asked in a rea.s.suring voice what she wanted done to her hair. It was then that Tijen turned to Celal, redirecting her glance from the s.p.a.ce now vacated by the cleaning lady and muttered: 'Not me, my daughter.' Next, as if to make her point clear, she slowly drew aside.

Only then did those in the beauty parlour notice the little girl with curly, ebony hair and exceptionally white skin in contrast, with large eyes tinged with no other colour but black. Her hair was wet, with drops that flowed down from the zigzags of her hair to leave shallow puddles at shoulder level, she looked as if she had been caught on the way over in one of those drizzly summer showers.

While Celal was busy taking his young customer to the seat in front of the mirror, Cemal, resignedly enduring the treatment he had been subjected to by the child's mother, invited her to one of the sofas on the side. Hygiene Tijen did not sit down right away. For a few seconds she remained standing, stuck in her uneasiness. She then gave up and halfheartedly perched on the closest sofa she had been directed to. When the manicurist, whose habit it was to ask every customer if they wanted a manicure within thirty seconds of their entering the parlour, suddenly appeared at her side, Tijen was sitting still, her gaze fixed on a stain on the floor, her mind floating elsewhere. The moment she heard the question directed at her, however, she withdrew her hands in disgust, as if touched by an invisible rat, and hid them behind her. Utterly unprepared for such a brusque reaction, the manicurist returned to her seat flabbergasted but as soon as she sat down, a gnawing suspicion crossed her mind. Could she have called her 'Misses Hygiene' instead of 'Misses Tijen'? Could that be why the woman's face had soured all of a sudden? Thinking in this vein, it would not take the manicurist long to be convinced of having made a blunder. After all, the mind has a proclivity to pessimism. Whenever it wavers between two contradictory options, it tends toward the negative one. For a moment the manicurist thought she should go back and apologize, but the only thing she ended up doing was cowering uneasily behind the manicure cart and secretly glancing around to figure out if anyone else had heard her blunder.

In the meanwhile, Su, placed by Celal in front of the mirror right next to the old woman, kept rotating her chair to observe her surroundings with a genuine curiosity brought about by being at the beauty parlour for the first time. Unfortunately, she had to cut her study short since wherever she turned she would encounter female eyes staring at her and rouged lips talking about her. The only person in this strange place who did not inspect her with such a sticky stare, thought Su, was the old woman sitting by her side. She knew her. She was their next door neighbour whom she ran into from time to time and who was always so nice to her. Now, with her tiny, overly made-up face sticking out of the plastic smock covering her entire upper body all the way to her neck, the old woman looked like a bust placed askew on its base, impishly painted in all colours.

Noticing the girl's gaze on her, Madam Auntie turned aside and gave her a smile. It seemed as if she was on the verge of saying something but Celal appeared right at that instant with a rectangular wooden plank. Whenever a child came to the beauty parlour, the twins placed this plank on top of the arms of the chairs to extend the height of the small customer. However, as soon as Su had fathomed Celal's intention, she fervently shook her head from side to side, glancing all the while at the old woman. 'But I am taller than her!' she finally protested in a piercing voice. 'Why doesn't she sit on the plank too?'

The objection was more than enough to leave Celal, who had never been much of a speechmaker anyway, speechless. On seeing that in response to the girl's outrageous remark, Madame Auntie was so far from being offended that she was actually laughing, he handed the plank back to the apprentice without pimples. Right afterward, however, as if having sensed a secret wisdom in the child's words, he carefully observed through the mirror the reflections of his two unusual customers. Sitting there side by side in front of the wide and long mirror with leopard-patterned smocks around their necks, they were startlingly alike. In point of fact they stood on two opposite poles of time one was eleven, the other seventy-eight, and yet both existed somewhere on the borderland of the human life-span. Su was mistaken. She was no taller than the old woman. Actually they were exactly the same height and maybe even the same weight. Uncanny as it was, that the frame an old person kept shrinking into would equal the frame a child had been growing into, they were like two elevators having fleetingly stopped at the same level while one was on the way up and the other down. After a second, an hour, a month... one of them would inevitably grow taller than they were at the moment, while the other would move correspondingly in the other direction, and no longer would they be alike. It was extraordinary that they had found each other, thought Celal, at this point of ephemeral equality.

Once he had found a resemblance between the old woman and the girl, it would not take Celal long to duplicate his love for the former by carving out a similar affection for the latter. That is precisely why he personally undertook not only the preparation of the girl's hair for tr.i.m.m.i.n.g but also the tr.i.m.m.i.n.g itself. He let loose the thick, curly, ebony hair tied up haphazardly by a resin ribbon and brushed with care the strands that still had water dripping off them. In the meantime, he had not neglected to ask the child her name, for whenever adults embark on a communication with a child, the very first thing that occurs to them is to ask their name and then immediately afterward to praise it. 'What a beautiful name you've got!' Celal beamed but Su paid hardly any attention to his comment, having now plunged into an ad-filled woman's journal with wild hairstyles on every page. She would have remained glued to the journal for quite some time had it not been for her mother's bloodcurdling scream.

Just as dogs approach those most scared of them or as the hair falls in the soup of the one person at a dining table who will be most disgusted by it, so the c.o.c.kroach Cemal had long lost track of had decided to enter none other than Hygiene Tijen's field of vision. The apprentice without pimples, determined to grovel to the bosses, immediately intervened. The bug was transformed under his shoe into a compressed residue of revulsion.

'These bugs have taken over everywhere,' Celal stammered, not knowing quite what to say next. Recently, he had been seeing creepy bugs around that he could not recognize at all. It was as if the variety of different breeds had increased along with their numbers. Some left a nasty smell when crushed. The apprentice ran to get the room spray.

'You need not wait, Misses Tijen,' wheedled Madam Auntie, detecting the horror that had appeared on the latter's face. 'Don't worry about your daughter. We'll come upstairs together.'

Hygiene Tijen was so desperate that she did not even wait for the offer to be repeated. In two seconds flat, she jumped over the corpse of the c.o.c.kroach, left the price of the haircut on the register and reached the door. Before going out, she stopped for a brief moment to wave at the old woman with appreciation and at her daughter with affection.

As soon as she left, the manicurist, having sat stiff as a poker for longer than she could tolerate, jumped to her feet. 'The lady couldn't stand it!' she bellowed twisting her face into a sour expression. 'I bet she couldn't drink the coffee because she found it dirty. She must have disliked not smelling any bleach in it.'

The plump ginger-head and the blonde with the cast eye jumped into the t.i.ttle-tattle, Cemal turned up the volume of the TV when he saw the video clip he had been awaiting for days finally being broadcast, another round of tea was served to all customers, cigarettes were lit one by one and with amazing speed the beauty parlour became immersed in its usual languor. Having now gotten rid of the guilt of being obligated to look the woman who was an all-time-favourite topic of gossip in the eye, they had no difficulty in going back to where they had left off. This can be called the 'Full-speed, full-throttle return of the repressed'. Just as nature detests emptiness, so too does the gossip-machine crave the completion of the missing pieces. The fact that there was now a child among them did not stop the gossipmongers in the beauty parlour, nor did the fact that the child belonged to the person they were lavishly criticizing behind her back. For when women start gossiping, not for the simple sake of chewing the fat, but authentically, unreservedly and with all their heart, they tend to deem either their voices inaudible or their children deaf.

As for Su, it was hard to tell if she was aware of the innuendos revolving around her mother's persona since she kept hiding behind that gaudy journal. On the page in front of her eyes stood the picture of a woman of mixed-race, who was naked from waist up and with her very short hair spiked and coloured in different phosph.o.r.escent hues.

'Do you like it?' asked Celal, upset about the talks and worried about the child. 'We can do your hair like that if you want. It would be a great hit at school.'

'No!' griped Su sullen-faced. 'My hair has to be shorter than that.'

'Come on, you don't have to have it so short. Let it grow a bit!' Celal objected.

Finally lifting her head from the journal, Su gave him an appraising look. An infinitesimal light furtively flickered and then faded inside the dark well of her eyes.

'No! Then my lice won't go away,' she protested, almost shouting.

The jittery brunette, all her permanent-wave rollers just removed, raised an eyebrow at the blonde with the cast eye. However, realizing she had an audience only goaded Su to increase her voice.

'The teacher called me at school. She had written a slip. "Take this, make sure your mother reads it," she said. Then they sent me home. My mother was very upset when she read it. She said I had lice. We went into the bathroom and washed it with medicine. We went through two shampoos. "You stay here," she said, I sat in the tub. Then she took off my clothes from the closet. She threw all of them out the window. She threw the sheets too, and my backpack, she threw that as well.'

'We didn't see a backpack,' the manicurist broodingly grumbled, with the discontent of someone who right after leaving the movie theatre learns that she has missed the most significant scene of the film.

'You probably picked them up at school. It happens all the time,' Celal said, trying to dismiss the matter lightly.

'I didn't pick them up at school,' Su shrugged her shoulders. 'Besides, there's no one at school with lice except me.'

The women looked at one another with meaningful smiles. It was scarcely news to them that Hygiene Tijen had adamantly sent her daughter to a high-priced school no one else could afford and, by spending all their money to this purpose, had totally wrecked not only her husband's nerves but also the foundations of her marriage.

'No one in the cla.s.sroom has lice but me. Now it'll spread from my head to the whole school,' giggled the girl. There was a shadowy, blemished tinge to her laughter. It was blemished because it was a laughter oblivious to the reactions of the people around her, originating in her alone to then flow once again back to her, not knowing where and when to stop, and perhaps only indicating a starvation for entertainment. It was shadowed because it was a laughter accelerating at full speed as Su egged herself on, getting out of control as it gained momentum, bordering silently on pain. Her laughter was inconsistent and maladjusted, totally detached from the contents of her talk. It was too unwieldy, too heavy, too much for a child her age.

'My mother says the lice came from my father. He got it from his hookers and then when he cuddled me, I got it from him.'

As if all the windows had been simultaneously opened wide and an unbridled wind rammed in, the women lined up in front of the wide mirror shuddered from top to toe. For it is awesome to hear the most private family secrets spill from the mouth of a child, pretty much like reaping the fruits of your neighbour's garden without actually stealing them. Though there might be a crime, there is no criminal around. Since when is it considered a crime to softly pull aside and make way for the muddy waters that will flow anyhow? Likewise, the beauty parlour populace had backed aside, becoming entirely silent so as to let the child speak fully and freely. They writhed impatiently to hear more, as much as possible, without getting involved, mixed up or messed up. Even Cemal, despite his long-established inability to stay still for more than two seconds and his tendency to poke his nose into each and every conversation around him, managed to keep utterly quiet. Only Madam Auntie felt the need to take action to end this unpleasant topic, but since she could not quite figure out what to say, all she did was to warn Celal to finish his job as quickly as possible and then shrank back into her chair to stay stock-still. Lost in her thoughts, she pulled out the pendant inside her blouse and distractedly caressed the stern face of Saint Seraphim.

Su twirled her chair around in a full circle and, as if to determine the impact of her words, took stock of everyone's faces. When she completed the circle and returned to her former position, her pitch black eyes met in the mirror the navy blue-grey eyes of the old woman which were glittering like a bead. As Madam Auntie delicately let out from her small, sharp nose the air she had drawn in with melancholy, she smiled with an embarra.s.sment that contained an apology somewhere within. It was difficult to tell if she was apologizing to certain people present on behalf of the child for what she had told or, just the opposite, if she apologized to the child for the curious listeners surrounding her. Though unable to decipher the meaning of this nebulous smile, Su could not help but smile back at her.

Having now speeded up, Celal called both apprentices to his side for help. Within a few minutes, all three resumed work with apparent intensity and blow-dried the hair of both the old woman and the little girl. By having his two apprentices hold two oval mirrors to their necks, he enabled them to see how their hair looked from the back. Thus besieged with mirrors from both the front and back, the images of the child and the old woman multiplied while their similarities concomitantly increased and coalesced.

Yet when they said goodbye to Celal, who saw them off all the way to the door, and started to climb the stairs of Bonbon Palace, the age difference between them became woefully apparent. The child stopped frequently to wait for the other, sometimes descending the stairs to accompany her up. When they reached the third floor in this manner, Madam Auntie stopped to catch her breath. As Su leaned against the door standing on one leg as if she were punished, she used this opportunity to share more with her new elderly friend that she had started to relax with.

'Three girls in the cla.s.s, they nicknamed me. Those name stickers on the notebooks, you know, they wrote "LICESU" in capital letters on mine. My real name is Bengisu, I just shorten it.'

'You know, I too had lice when I was a little girl,' muttered Madam Auntie, in spite of her discomfort about the girl's laughter.

'Really? Did they nickname you as well?' said Su, while trying to figure out who the red-bearded, frowning 'grandfather' dangling from her necklace was.

'No, they didn't nickname me. We had a washer woman, she used to line all her children up and split their lice. She picked all my lice as well. My poor mother had a fit. She was a delicate woman, couldn't handle such things. That was the way she was brought up. What could she do? If a rose in the garden withered, she would take to her bed with grief, if she saw a dead rat, she could not recover for days. I guess she was born in the wrong age...'

The woman's navy blue-grey eyes became l.u.s.treless, if only for a moment. With the intuition unique to those who have long prohibited themselves from remembering specific events and mentioning certain names, she sensed she was about to enter the forbidden garden of her memory and withdrew immediately. As if sharing a secret, she teasingly winked at the child whose head appeared even smaller after her haircut.

'Don't pay attention to their calling you "Licesu" or anything else. Everyone gets lice as a child and not only as a child. People get lice when they grow up as well. How can you know who has lice and who does not? Can you see lice with the naked eye? Everyone claims to be clean as a whistle but believe me they too have lice somewhere in them!'

More convinced of the good intention behind the words than the words themselves, Su ran to ring her doorbell as soon as they reached the fourth floor. 'I'm baaaaack!' she yelled when the door opened. Though Hygiene Tijen looked worried that they were late, she seemed to have cleared away her earlier anxiety as she thanked her neighbour. 'It looks good, both short and very chic,' responded Madam Auntie. Then they looked at one another with the stress of feeling obliged to say a few more things but not quite knowing what those could be.

'I would've invited you in but the cleaning is still not finished. Everything was interrupted when the cleaning lady took off,' stuttered Hygiene Tijen. The stressed, skittish woman at the beauty parlour seemed to have disappeared, leaving a timid, reticent copy in her place.

'Of course, of course, go ahead with your cleaning, but don't tire yourself out too much. You were exhausted today; lie down and rest a little. Anyhow, I have things to do.'

They had never visited each other's houses until then. They sometimes ran into each other at the door and exchanged a few courtesies.

'How can I possibly sleep!' Tijen broke in. 'I get headaches from this disgusting smell. My husband says I exaggerate. Do you think I do? You too get the same smell, don't you? Tell me, Madam Auntie, do you get the garbage smell?'

An indiscernible shadow crossed Madam Auntie's face. When she started to speak again, her voice was rough and rugged, just like her faded hands with the protruding veins.

'Years ago my brother travelled to Cairo. He said one heard a 'hum' as soon as one got off the plane. The hum of Cairo! Yet the airport was quite a way from the city. It turns out a city spreads its hum for miles. Just think, what kind of a city it must be, what kinds of people must live in it for them to overflow like that! Isn't our Istanbul like that, Misses Tijen? Though Cairo hums, Istanbul smells. Strangers are aware of its smell before they even approach the city. We can't smell it, of course. They say a snake likes milk a lot and finds milk through its sense of smell, but could it detect the smell of milk if it swam in the milk cauldron? Probably the Cairene wouldn't hear the hum and the Istanbulite couldn't spot the smell of his or her own cities and these are such old cities. When I was young, I didn't know Istanbul was so old. Naturally, as it ages, the garbage increases. I no longer get angry. Neither should you be angry, Misses Tijen.'

Not knowing what to say Hygiene Tijen emptily blinked the round, long eye-lashed ebony eyes she had pa.s.sed on to her daughter. Another p.r.i.c.kly silence descended upon the two women. Such intermittently scattered silences are refrains in the conversations of those who are not used to talking to one another; they repeat themselves with set interludes. They uttered a few more words about garbage, a few more words about various other things and wished each other a nice day. The doors were carefully closed, with special attention being paid to not banging them loudly, but the women did not immediately get back to their own tasks. Both stood without a sound for about ten seconds becoming all ears to try to figure out from the noises what the other one was up to. No matter how hard they tried, however, neither could hear a thing.

Flat Number 5: Hadji Hadji and His Son, Daughter-in-Law and Grandchildren.

'Once upon a time there lived a much venerated saint...'

'But you said it was gonna be a real story this time!' yelled the seven and a half year old, 'Why did you start it again like a fairytale?'

Hadji Hadji pouted at the boy in anguish. Among his three grandchildren it was this child who upset him most, upset him like no other. He was not human, this boy, but a jinni disguised as human or, even worse, the mixed offspring of a jinni and a human being. That was why he had turned out to be so peculiar, with a head like a demijohn...but the moment the old man caught himself thinking of such things, he felt ashamed. He immediately repented and shooed such wicked thoughts away. Repentance had with time produced some sort of a spontaneous effect on him. Whenever ashamed, he would immediately repent, like a muscle spasm, with an urge almost as uncontrollable. He did so again, three times successively. First he repented for attempting to grasp and even question with his limited mind why Allah had created people as He had. After that he repented for having indirectly and inadvertently mistrusted his daughter-in-law's chast.i.ty by tracing the bloodline of his grandson to the jinni. Finally, he repented for having such dreadful thoughts about a little sick child. This last one, however, he had uttered out loud. The seven and a half year old narrowed his moss green eyes into a line and, as if he had understood something had been said about him, observed the old man even more carefully. Hadji Hadji hastily averted his eyes. Even if not a jinni, who could deny that this child was jinn-like?

Allah had conferred to his siblings all the beauty He had withheld from him, but then, to ensure justice, had bestowed upon him far more intelligence than his siblings, actually even more than the entire family line. What was he going to be like when he grew up? Not only his body, but the disproportion between his head and his body grew day by day. How much bigger could his head expand than the one and a half times its normal size it had already grown to? His hands could not bend back but twisted inside like a monkey's. How much longer could he live with these clawed hands and with the 'Ma-ro-te-aux-la-syn-drome' that no one in the family had even been able to correctly p.r.o.nounce? Suddenly feeling a tug at his heartstrings, he forced his face into a smile.

'This isn't a fairytale, it's the plain truth,' he said with a gentle expression. 'The saint lived a very long time ago, that's why it came out of my mouth sounding like a fairytale. These things really happened. He even has a tomb. If you don't believe me, you can go and see it with your own eyes.'

The moment he said this he recognized what a 'gaffe' he had made. His oldest grandchild could no longer leave the house. It was to his best interest that he did not. Unlike his peers and siblings the boy's entire world consisted of this one hundred and five metres square house. With a compa.s.sion rolled up in mercy, the old man patted the child's puny back.

'This great saint, before he was a saint, used to be a dervish. When his Excellency Sultan Muhammed the Conqueror besieged the city of Istanbul, he immediately ran to help. They beat the city walls with cannons. They fought for days but weren't able to get the Byzantine infidel to surrender. Then our dervish had an audience with the sultan. He said, "My sultan, give me permission to open a big breach in these walls so our soldiers can get in from that gap and snap off the infidel's neck like that of a chicken." The sultan looked at the ordinary, ragged dervish standing in front of him. What could such a meek man accomplish? He didn't believe him and expelled him from his audience. Weeks pa.s.sed by and they still weren't able to take Istanbul. The great Ottoman army was exhausted from thirst and fatigue. Then the sultan remembered this dervish and beckoned him back to his presence. "Here is your permission, go ahead" he said. The delighted dervish kissed his Excellency Sultan Muhammed the Conqueror's hand and sleeve. He said his goodbyes to all the other dervishes. Then he walked around the city walls to think about which point of attack to pick and finally decided on one particular spot. The walls were thicker there and there were more soldiers to boot. For behind that wall was the palace of the Byzantine king. Then the dervish said, "Now throw me to those walls." They were of course surprised but still carried out his wish. They put the dervish in the cannon and hurled him.'

'Come on. They killed the man,' exclaimed the seven and a half year old.

'No they didn't! He is not like you and I, he didn't become a saint for nothing.' Hadji Hadji softened his voice for the sake of all he had repented a moment ago. 'They threw the dervish. With that speed, he went and attached himself to the walls. He didn't fall, that is. He opened wide his hands and feet and grabbed onto those thick walls like a spider. The Byzantine soldiers were teeming like ants there. When they saw the dervish, they threw poisoned arrows. Not one of them fell on the target. Next they showered flaming arrows. Wherever the arrows fell, fire erupted. They set the gra.s.s on fire, burned the trees, the whole place was in flames like doomsday, but nothing happened to the dervish. Not even a single thread of his hair caught on fire. He stood in the flames like a salamander. From afar he looked and smiled on the Conqueror's soldiers. There he prayed until night fell, performing the ablutions at sunset.'

'If he's glued to the wall, how could he perform the ablutions?' hollered the seven and a half year old in a shrill voice.

'He performed them with his eyes,' replied the Hadji Hadji now staring angrily. 'Your deceased grandmother, may she rest in peace, also performed her ablutions with her eyes. Those who can't bend down and up do so. Then when the dervish finished his ablutions he said, "My Allah, take my life and turn me into a void!" Allah accepted his prayer and lightning struck in the sky. Remember how the arrows of the Byzantines had been showered right onto him from up close and not even one had found its target? But now a faraway lightning came from the seventh heaven and hit him right on target. The dervish turned into ash. Then, where he had clung to the wall, a large hole appeared. The Conqueror's fighters could not believe their eyes. The hole they could not open for days was all of a sudden created thanks to the dervish. They immediately plunged in through that hole, put the commander of the infidels to the sword and took the city. When his Excellency Sultan Muhammed the Conqueror settled in Istanbul, he didn't forget the self-sacrifice of this dervish. He wanted to have a tomb built for him. Yet the dervish didn't have a corpse. "If there is no corpse, how could there be a grave? What shall we bury?" grumbled the soldiers.'

The five and a half year old, who was accustomed to suck till the last drop the privileges granted to her for being the only girl and the youngest child, looked at her grandfather with eyes glazed in fear. In her ornate 'grammar bag', where she put the new words she learned every day, she collected some other words in a place separate from the others, in a wallet with snaps, for instance: 'spirit', 'doomsday', or 'ghost'; likewise: 'demon', 'devil', 'deceased', 'ogre' or 'h.e.l.lhound.' She rolled in her little fingers the word 'salamander' she had just heard and placed it there as well. All these words had one meaning for her: jinn! As for what the jinn was, she did not fully know, but whenever she felt the need to know, she plunged her hand into the wallet with snaps, inside her smart ornate bag, randomly pulling out a word. Hence, somewhere in the recesses of her mind, the indistinct figure of a jinn that had so many different names though it did not exist, transparent like the gossamer wings of a fly, was nourished from all sides and constantly grew fatter, spreading every pa.s.sing day like a shameless smokescreen to cover an ever larger terrain.

'They performed ablutions for him in absentia and then they took the empty coffin onto their shoulders,' continued Hadji Hadji after taking a small break to sip on his tea. 'They started to walk, but where were they to go? They could never decide where to bury him. However, at this point the coffin suddenly took wings! It started to move by itself, right in front of them. They crossed many rivers and hills, coffin in the front, mourners in the back, up and down six of the seven hills of Istanbul. When they came to the seventh hill, they looked and saw in a distance an empty grave: a grave dug deep and left open. The coffin immediately dashed in that direction, started to descend right onto the top of the grave and remained hanging in the air until one hand span from the bottom. Then a howling was heard from the grave...'

The five and a half year old gulped loudly, but deep in his trance, Hadji Hadji did not notice that detail. Whatever attention he had left he reserved for his oldest grandchild.

'They then lowered the coffin into this empty grave. After that they built a tomb over it. The saint's name became Father Void. The pa.s.sers-by always recited a prayer for his soul.'

'But the man isn't even there! Don't they know the grave is empty? Who are they praying to?'

'Women who can't have children pay a visit to Father Void,' muttered Hadji Hadji pretending not to hear the question. 'If brides with empty wombs go to Father Void, pray, and then sit alone by his tomb all night long without falling asleep, their prayers will be granted at dawn. They'll give birth to a healthy child within a year.'

All three children reacted in their own way to these words. The five and a half year old reopened her wallet of snaps, gingerly placing 'void' among the words that corresponded to 'jinn.' The six and a half year old, who was particularly interested in all topics that could somehow be a.s.sociated with s.e.xuality, seemed more concerned with the brides' part than the saints. As for the seven and a half year old, he in turn had questions to articulate, objections to raise. Still, however, he did not say a word. It was time for the noon nap, and that, the kid reckoned, was far more imperative than identifying the numerous mistakes in the rationale operating behind his grandfather's tales.

Around these hours of the afternoon, time in Flat Number 5 gradually slowed down. The same things were always repeated every day in the same order. Early in the morning their mother went to work and their father to look for work. When left alone with their grandfather, every weekday morning without fail, an argument broke out among them regarding the television. Hadji Hadji would rather not have the children watch much television but, if they did, preferred it to be one of those insipid children's programmes or even better, the cartoons that were simultaneously broadcast on a couple of channels. The kids however had a different choice, insisting on watching the morning programme hosted by a chatty and flirtatious person who wore outfits that, depending on the day, either left bare the red rosebud tattoo on her belly or the cleavage of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. When their request was not granted, they either took out the battle-axe and went on the attack or became fussy and refused to talk to their grandfather. Hadji Hadji's reaction also varied daily. Now and then he put up with the situation and while the children watched the programme, he kept reading one of the four books he owned a number which had remained the same over the years. At times he got hold of the remote control and, in spite of all the objections buzzing around him, fixed the screen on the first cartoon he could find. On other occasions, he tried to draw his grandchildren's attention away from the screen and wore out his imagination by concocting various games, each more strained than the other. Whatever he did, however, he could not wrest power away from them, especially not from his oldest grandchild, until noon. After that things got worse for the old man for they would, just like they had been doing every weekday for the last two months, pile up all the sheets, pillows and covers in the middle of the living room and start to create 'Osman'.

Two months previously, Hadji Hadji had read to his grandchildren the first three chapters of one of his four books ent.i.tled, 'How Was a Magnificent Empire Born and Why Did it Decline?' When he took a break, he got, as usual, three dissimilar reactions from his three grandchildren. The seven and a half year old had listened austerely, attentively and was now ready to voice a couple of issues of great interest to him: 'Grandpa, how many tents did the Turks have when they arrived in Anatolia?' 'A thousand!' Hadji Hadji hastily made up. Yet that response did little to satisfy the child's curiosity. 'About how many people in all were there in these thousand tents?' 'Ten thousand!' Hadji Hadji roared. The anger dripping from his response only provoked his oldest grandchild even more. 'When the Turks came with their tents, weren't there already other people in Anatolia?' 'No, there weren't, this land was empty, whoever was there had run away,' grumbled Hadji Hadji. 'Okay, did the Turks settle in the houses of those who had run away? Or did they continue to live as nomads for some time? Did they build their first cities out of tents? In that case would that be a tent-metropolis? How could one draw on a map a city that was peripatetic? How...?'

'Shut up!' Hadji Hadji had replied losing control.

The child had indeed shut up but all the questions that had acc.u.mulated on his tongue circulated in his mouth, moved up through the pa.s.sages of his nose and climbed up from there to trickle into his teardrop ducts, so in his moss green pupils curious, insistent, accusing sparks of questions continued to light up and fade away like fireflies flitting about on summer nights.

In order not to keep looking at him, the old man had turned with a weak expectation to the six and a half year old, but judging from the indifferent expression on his face the only thing he registered from the story was that there were many concubines in the harem and it was not a good thing to be born as the brother of a sultan. With a final crumb of hope, Hadji Hadji turned to his youngest grandchild, the five and a half year old. It was then that the little girl, her face bright with excitement, jumped on her grandfather's lap, nudged him with her pinkish-white elbows and with the cutesy manner she a.s.sumed whenever she wanted anything from grownups, cooed: 'Come on, grandpa, let's build a tent too!'

Had Hadji Hadji not been so distressed with the apathy of his male grandchildren, he probably would have hesitated before jumping at this idea, but since with a sleight of his hand he had transferred all of his love to the youngest grandchild in order to punish the other two, he soon found himself among piles of sheets and pillows busily building a tent in the middle of the living room. They too would have a tent just like the dynasty of Osman.

Compared to the tents they later built, the first one was rather primordial. The grandfather and the child had produced a small, covered area by throwing a few sheets over the four chairs arranged in a square and then filling this area with pillows. Yet the tent, even in this simple form, had succeeded in drawing the attention of the other two who had not partic.i.p.ated in the game and had, until then, suspiciously watched everything from the side. After a while, they could not resist and, dying to see this hidden, compressed world constructed in the middle of the living room, had parted the sheet intended to be the door and joined their grandfather who was sitting cross-legged on the pillows. Surprisingly Hadji Hadji felt swelling within him the type of pure pride he had yearned for so long. It was this pride or the possibility of it that had led the old man to wholeheartedly embrace this game. Yet how wretchedly shaky the foundations were, and how fragile the domination he had by chance established in the house, would become evident in no more than a day.

Around the same time the next day, the five and a half year old had placed herself in his lap in exactly the same manner: 'Come on, grandpa, let's make Osman!' When the old man heard the name 'Osman', his hair stood up as he had not yet been able to get rid of the fatigue the previous tent-exercise had produced on his out of shape legs and stiff back. Alas, neither his dulcet warnings nor his seething anger had been of much help in teaching the girl that the tent was not supposed to be called 'Osman'. Such was the girl's nature. Once she coupled one word with another, no authority in the world could sever this linguistic connection in her mind. Just as ghosts, spirits, ogres, h.e.l.lhounds and the deceased were altogether lumped in the category of 'JINN', so too was the tent called 'OSMAN'.

After that Osman became an essential part of their lives. Now every day around the same time the children started to get antsy like drunkards awaiting their drinking time. Within half an hour, all the sheets, bedspreads, mattresses and pillows were piled in the middle of the living room. Even though Hadji Hadji hoped in vain that, with their record of getting bored with all the games they played, his flighty grandchildren would also get their fill of Osman, this was not to be. On the contrary, they gradually expanded the boundaries of the tent adding new rooms, sections and cavities, leading a blissfully nomadic life in an area of five and ten square metres. Osman was rebuilt at noon every day, stayed in the middle of the living room until late in the afternoon, and then when it started to get dark outside, was taken down in a flash minutes before the parents were due back from work.

There were a number of other incidents repeated daily without exception. For instance, the phone rang around the same time, around 11:45 a.m., after the last minute theatregoers had settled in their seats for the noon show. Each time it was the oldest kid who answered the phone. He reported what they had done since morning, always giving the same responses to the same questions: yes, they had finished their breakfasts...no, they weren't being naughty...yes, they were watching television...no, grandfather wasn't telling a story...no, they hadn't turned on the gas...no, they didn't mess the house up...no, they didn't hang out of the balcony...no, they didn't play with fire...no, they didn't enter the bedroom...Allah was his witness that grandfather didn't tell a story...' and so forth...

Even though deep down the Daughter-in-Law was suspicious of her older son's honesty, never willing to call her father-in-law to the phone, she had to be satisfied with what she heard. Meanwhile, as the seven and a half year old held the phone in his hand and recited his usual responses with a suggestion of slyness in his voice, not even for a second did he take his eyes off his grandfather. He was more than aware of the continuous tension between the two adults and had long since discovered that he could bolster his power by favouring, as the occasion dictated, one adult over the other.

Not only did they have their meals inside Osman, but they listened to their bed-time stories there as well. Every day after lunch before their nap, new personalities joined them: coldhearted stepmothers, ill-fated orphans, h.e.l.lhounds escaping from the bowels of the earth, bandits waylaying people, female jinns seducing men, bloodied fighters, certified madmen, poisonous rattlesnakes, spiteful hags with sagging flesh, malicious skeletal demons and ogres with protruding eyes...all crammed into the tent. Once they arrived, they never wanted to leave. As the concluding sentences of the fairytale still smoked in the air weariness descended upon them. Everyone curled up in their place. Hadji Hadji was the one to fall asleep the fastest and the easiest, followed by the five and a half year old and then the six and a half year old. As his grandfather's snores and his siblings' puffs filled the tent, the seven and a half year old got up quietly. First he stopped by his grandfather and watched him. He watched as if examining a creature he did not know, a tropical fruit he had not tasted or a clam filled with surprises, Hadji Hadji's round, greying beard rising and falling with each intake of breath, the amber prayer bead that had slid from his fingers, the greying hair creeping from his chest to his neck, his cracked lips, the deep wrinkles that had cut paths across his forehead... He had started to examine his grandfather two and a half years ago and was soon about to complete his discovery.

That mild, fragrant day when he had met his grandfather for the first time had been a turning point for the child, as it also happened to be the last day he was able to walk around outside. Then his illness had advanced so rapidly and had become so visible that he had never been out onto the streets ever again.

In the fading residues of that distant past, when he was still considered or at least looked looked like a normal child, when his father and mother had to go to the airport to pick up his grandfather, they had taken him along as well. Until that day, he had not heard much about the old man. All he knew was that his name was Hadji, he lived with his wife in a far away city, they had had a traffic accident when travelling to Istanbul to see their grandchildren for the first time and the grandmother had died in the accident. After losing his wife, grandfather Hadji had cried a lot, been hospitalized for a while and gone on the pilgrimage to Mecca as soon as he was discharged. Having now completed the pilgrimage he was coming back. This was all the seven and a half year old who had then been five knew about him. On the way to the airport, he had also acquired another piece of noteworthy information: from now on, grandfather Hadji was going to live in Istanbul with them.

The part of the airport reserved for the pa.s.sengers' relatives was jammed. After descending from the plane and completing a whole bunch of bureaucratic procedures the pa.s.sengers pa.s.sed through the automatic door swishing open to be reunited with their awaiting relatives. As the kid waited in the crowd holding tightly onto his mother's and father's hands, he carefully looked at every person pa.s.sing by. All these old men back from their pilgrimage were surprisingly like carbon copies of each other and the reason for this similarity was not only that they were all dressed in the same colour, were of the same age and height and possessed the same round, greyish beard. They also unerringly repeated, as soon as they went through the door, the same motions in the same sequence. When the door opened, they all narrowed their eyes as if suddenly encountering a beam of light, looked at the crowd, took a few steps in this state, then saw someone and dashed in that direction, put down the suitcases and exuberantly embraced the acquaintances who scurried toward them. In making their entrance, the elderly copied one another exactly, it was as if, rather than a plane load of different people, the same man kept walking in through the automatic doors again and again.

Then the door swished open one more time and through it entered a man whom he guessed, from his mother's and father's reactions, was his grandfather. This man, though dressed just like the other pilgrims, still looked like a stranger who had mistakenly become mixed up among them. It was as if he was not even old but was rather a successful imitator who had plunged into the changing room at the last minute to don the clothes of one of the others. He almost looked like them but was nevertheless an imitator because something was obviously missing. Blinking his moss green eyes, the kid looked once again and only then he grasped where the deficiency originated: this old man did not have a beard! Where there had to be a beard shone a dazzling white crescent curving up the area within the crescent having amply received its share from the sun, the north of his face was pitch dark as night while the south as pallid as a cloudless morning.

The man with the 'unfinished face' had longingly embraced the grandchild he was seeing for the first time. Then he had sequentially embraced his son, again his grandson, the Daughter-in-Law, again his grandson, again his son, and then again and again his grandson. Meanwhile, soon everyone around them was embracing one another, the airport waiting area filled-up entirely with cl.u.s.ters of humans who cried, kissed, embraced and b.u.mped into one another. When the elderly men returning from the pilgrimage had somewhat satisfied their yearning for one another, they became deeply occupied with introducing each other to their own families which this time around led to handshakes, hugs and embraces across the cl.u.s.ters. In that uproar, the kid pa.s.sed around from one lap to another had registered another observation in his memory book: those 'Mehmets' returning from the pilgrimage were called 'Hadji Mehmet,' and the 'Ahmets' were called 'Hadji Ahmet.' On the way back, he had asked his father the question that had preoccupied him, 'If one had to go to the pilgrimage to deserve the name Hadji, how was it that his grandfather's name had become Hadji by birth, before going to the pilgrimage or indeed anything? And since his name was already Hadji, why on earth had he gone to the pilgrimage?' While his face was incomplete, it was as if his name was overly complete. 'You rascal!' his father had scolded him. As that was far from being a satisfying answer, it only helped to serve the kid's conviction that his grandfather was unlike any other grandfather. Ever since then he thought his grandfather was somewhat 'eccentric.' That the old man had been obliged to cut his beard because of a bad rash a day before his return from Mecca and had quickly grown it afterwards, thus after a short while looking like all other grandfathers at the airport, had little effect in convincing the boy to the contrary.

Now after all these years, even though he still studied his grandfather, he had begun to cut his examinations shorter with every pa.s.sing day, mainly because he did not find him as interesting as he had in the past. Once bored of watching the old man, he got out of Osman without a sound and started to tiptoe around the house. To be up when everyone else was asleep was a terrific privilege. The house would then resemble the castle in 'Sleeping Beauty'. For, unlike his siblings, the seven and a half year old did remember the fairytales his mother used to tell them in the mornings long before she had started working at the cinema of a shopping mall. He recalled those fairytales and discerned the difference between those and the ones told by his grandfather.

While the others slept, he would go into the kitchen, light the oven, play with matches, leaf through the four books of his grandfather, the total number of which had stayed constant through the years, snack on junk food, go into his parents' bedroom and poke around the wardrobes, dump his mother's jewellery on the bed, count the money his father hid at the corner of the wardrobe...he made the most of doing everything that was forbidden. Then, when the others' waking up time approached, tiptoeing back into the tent, he lay down in a corner and patiently waited. He did not have to wait too long. Every day the garbage truck entered Cabal Street around 5:30 p.m. The voices of the garbage collectors, the clatter of the emptied cans and the grumble of the engine rose up from below. There were cars parked on each side of the road, so the garbage truck could not manoeuvre easily and the traffic would be jammed for sure. As soon as the honks of the car horns reached Flat Number 5 of Bonbon Palace, Hadji Hadji was jolted out of his sleep, almost screaming. In point of fact, Bonbon Palace was one of the last places where this old man, who carried in the wrinkles of his forehead, his face and in his heart the traces of the traffic accident he had been through, could comfortably take a snooze.

The children also awoke with Hadji Hadji's scream. First the five and a half year old woke up, muttering fussily. Then the six and a half year old got up, lazily yawning. As for the seven and a half year old, he would not immediately get up from the place where he had laid down only a couple of minutes previously, but instead counted silently to twenty to give the others enough time to fully wake up. Then, standing up groggily he would rub his moss green eyes and, hiding the sharp glint within them, approach the open window and stretch his neck to look at the doors of the outside world filled with secrets which he deeply sensed could be much more horrifying than all the fairytales he had heard.

Flat Number 7: Me.

Strange as it was, I woke up without the help of an alarm clock this morning. As if that was not astonishing enough, when I woke up, I found myself already awake. My eyes were open as if they had awoken by themselves and having once done that, had taken to wandering around the ceiling. For a fleeting moment I thought I was looking at myself from the ceiling. I cannot say I liked what I saw.