The Flea Palace Part 5

Deep down HisWifeNadia was fond of being so well informed about all these things that still remained a mystery to Loretta herself. Whenever the latter made a wrong turn failing to spot the truth behind the intricacies she faced, HisWifeNadia was secretly thrilled. At such moments, her life and the one in the soap opera would sneak into one another. Between these two entirely dissimilar universes it was Loretta who stood out as the common denominator, the pa.s.sageway from one to another. Physically, she was there in the life of the soap opera; and vocally, she was here in the life of HisWifeNadia. Ultimately, there were two distinct women around: the Latin American actress who played Loretta on the one side, and the Turkish speaker who voiced Loretta on the other. Though none of them was named Loretta in real life, in her mind HisWifeNadia had identified both with that particular name. She had no problem whatsoever with the first Loretta, the Latin American actress being of no concern to her. Her foremost target was not the Loretta she watched but the one she heard. It was that voice that she had been after for so long; a voice with no face...a velvety, dulcet voice that came to life in a k.n.o.bby, peach-puff kneecap... Nonetheless, since every voice required a visage and every visage a voice, as she stood watching 'The Oleander of Pa.s.sion', the voice she heard and the face she saw would so easily blend into one another that HisWifeNadia would soon miss the target, shifting her focus from the woman doing the voiceover to the Latin American actress on the screen. Then she could do little to prevent herself from watching the soap opera with a twisted gaze; taking pleasure in the scenes where Loretta was in pain and feeling distressed whenever things went well for her.

The Loretta on the screen was a slender brunette with jade eyes and long legs. When she cried, tears round as peas rolled down her cheeks. As for the woman who did Loretta's voiceover, HisWifeNadia could not quite surmise what her body looked like since she had not been able to eye-her-up thoroughly on that ominous day when the two had run into each other. She must be one of those ephemeral beauties, HisWifeNadia guessed, as fleeting and frail as a candle flame. Shine as she might with the freshness of youth at the present, her beauty would be tarnished sooner or later, in five years at most. When that day arrived, she would have to pull herself together and stop going after married men. Still, five years was a long time long enough to cause HisWifeNadia anguish, as she had to face the prospects of all the things that could happen until then.

It was a pure coincidence that had made HisWifeNadia aware of Loretta's voice three months ago. On the morning of that ill-starred day, she was in the kitchen once again to cook ashure. Even though she had considerably improved her culinary skills since her arrival in Turkey, her ashure was still not as good as she Metin Chetinceviz more precisely wanted it to be. Countless experiments had all ended up in flop. There was either too much or too little sugar or some ingredient missing altogether, and if not these, even when everything was mixed in properly, something would go wrong in the cooking phase. When cooked for an adequate amount of time, she would remove the ashure from the stove and dole it out into frosty pink cups. Desperate to have made it right this time, she would take great pains to garnish each and every cup with pomegranate seeds. In the beginning there was a time when she used to overdo this, dissatisfied with the hackneyed decorations of Turkish housewives. Longing for novelty, instead of a dash of grated coconuts, roasted hazelnuts or powdered sugar, she would sprinkle a few drops of cognac or place sour cherries fermented in rum. Back then she was interested more in the legend of the ashure than in how the Turks consumed it.

The ashure in the legend was the epitome of a triumph deemed unachievable. All the creatures boarding Noah's ship in pairs to escape doomsday had cooked it together at a time when they could no longer endure the journey, when they were surrounded on four sides with water and were in danger of extinction given an empty pantry and with a long way still to go. Each animal had handed over its leftovers and hence this amazing concoction had emerged by mixing things that would otherwise never match. Though there was not much doubt as to what modern-day ashure was composed of, still the components of this dessert weren't entirely evident, and extra ingredients things could be added into it any time. It was precisely this lack of a fixed recipe that made ashure so unlike other desserts. Neither the ingredients were restricted nor the measurements fixed. As such, it ultimately resembled a cosmopolitan city where foreigners would not be excluded and latecomers could swiftly mix with the natives. Ashure was limitlessness generated by limited options, affluence born from scarcity and vast a.s.sortment burgeoning out of extinction.

About all these HisWifeNadia wrote at length to her aunt an elderly spinster with legs covered with purplish varicose veins and hair as red as h.e.l.l. In her letters HisWifeNadia wrote extensively about how drastically she had changed since her arrival in Turkey, how much time she now set aside to cook and also how she had come to acknowledge her aunt's a.n.a.logies between meals and the verses in the sacred book. Her aunt was highly pious and just as good a cook. She resolutely, if not condescendingly, believed these two attributes of hers amounted to the same thing since 'The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened' (Matthew 4:33). The meals she cooked for her family, she placed upon G.o.d's table and watching her children gobble them down she felt blissful as if it were He who had been fed.

'There exists a command of G.o.d in every meal we consume,' the aunt was fond of claiming. 'Needless to say, that is with the exception of the slapdash meals invented by those messy women who apparently have no time to cook and mistake freedom with neglecting their homes, preferring the praise of their bosses to the grat.i.tude of their children!'

Now in her letters to this aunt, HisWifeNadia wrote that among all the food of the world, if any were to be likened to the Tower of Babel in the Holy Bible, it had to be this ashure. Just like in the Tower of Babel, in the pudding cauldron too, miscellaneous types that would otherwise never come together managed to mingle without fusing into one another. Just as the workers at the Tower had failed to comprehend each other's language, so too did each ingredient in the cauldron retain its distinctiveness within that common zest. The fig in the ashure, for instance, though subjected to so many processes and boiled for so long, still preserved its own flavour. As they boiled there on the stove, all the ingredients prattled on in unison but each in its own language.

Hence supplementary ingredients could be incessantly added to this totality. If there was room in ashure for garbanzo beans, why not add corn as well? Where there was fig, there could be plum too, or why not peach alongside apricot, pasta in the company of rice...? In her first few months at Bonbon Palace, HisWifeNadia had for a reason still unknown to her fervently busied herself with such experiments. Yet, ramming each time into Metin Chetinceviz's fierce retorts, she had in next to no time exhausted her daring to experiment with further combinations. Whatever the legend of Noah's Arc and the adventure behind it, when it came to putting the teachings into practice, ashure turned out to be a highly unadventurous food. It did not welcome innovations. Her aunt, though never in her life having cooked ashure, must have arrived at the same conclusion for she had felt the need to caution in her letters that just as one could not modify the verses of the Bible as one pleased, it was better not to play with ingredients freely either. Eventually HisWifeNadia had given up, starting to cook the ashure in line with the routine. Be that as it may, perhaps because deep inside she still pined for a boundless variation and had never been able to make do with the ingredients in hand, the end product had failed to meet her expectations all this time.

Nonetheless, there was one occasion, that ill-starred day, when she had inexplicably been satisfied with her ashure. Having finished the cooking, as usual, she had put the cauldron aside to cool off, prepared the frosty pinky cups and started waiting eagerly for her husband to come home. Now that she had accomplished the outcome she had craved for so long, she expected to finally receive Metin Chetinceviz's appreciation. Yet, she had soon noticed that stinking amber briefcase of his was not in its place. That could only mean one thing: Metin Chetinceviz was going to head to his second job this evening, from which he would probably return around midnight. Her achievement at ashure had excited HisWifeNadia so much that she couldn't possibly wait that long. Hence she decided to do something that had never crossed her mind before: to pay a visit to Metin Chetinceviz's workplace with a cup of ashure.

Though it had been four years since she had arrived in this city, Istanbul remained a colossal mystery to her. She had seen so little of the city so far that she had no sense of the direction in which its streets lay nor any sense of its structure in her mind. Her ensuing audacity might therefore be attributed to nothing but ignorance. In such a state she headed to the studio on the Asian Side. Though crossing the Bosphorus Bridge had cost her two hours, finding the address turned out to be unexpectedly easy. She left her identification card at the entrance, received information from the receptionist, got in the elevator, went up to the fifth floor, walked to Room 505, peeped inside and stood petrified. Metin Chetinceviz was there sitting knee-to-knee with a woman; he had placed one hand on the k.n.o.bby, peach-puff kneecap of the latter which puckered like a blemish too timid to come to light. As for his other hand, he employed that to rotate a tiny coffee cup, as he told the woman her fortune. It must have been good news, for a dimpled smile had blossomed on the latter's face. Fixated with her husband, HisWifeNadia was not able to eye-up the woman as much as she would like to. It wasn't so much the fact that she'd been cheated on which rendered her speechless, rather the affectionate expression on Metin Chetinceviz's face. Neither the woman in the room, nor the hand caressing her knee seemed a sight as horrid as the affectionate expression upon her husband's face, so dulcet and tender, so unlike her husband.

Up until now, HisWifeNadia had forgiven each and every one of Metin Chetinceviz's wrongs and in her jaded way endured his never-ending jealousies, callousness, even slaps, believing that he did it all involuntarily, almost against his own will. Yes, her husband treated her in an awful way occasionally that is, frequently that is, constantly but this was because he did not know any better. To sustain a flawed marriage requires, in essence, rather than an obstinate faith in marriage a faith in obduracy as such. We can endure being treated brutally by the person we love, if and only if, and as long as, we can convince ourselves that he knows no better and is unable to act in any other way.

'Love is nothing but neurochemical machinery,' Professor Kandinsky used to contend. 'And the most faithful lovers are simply bird-brained. If you meet a woman who's been married for years, still head-over-heels in love with her husband, be a.s.sured that her memory works like that of a t.i.tmouse.'

According to Professor Kandinsky, for love to be immortal, memory needed to be mortal. In point of fact memory had to be fully capable of incessantly dying and reviving just like day and night, spring and fall, or like the neurons in the hypothalamus of those teeny-weeny t.i.tmice. These birds with their simple brains and with bodies just as frail had to remember each year a bulk of indispensable information, including where they had hidden their eggs, how to survive the winter chill, where to find food. As their memories were not large enough to shelter so many crumbs of information, rather than trying to stockpile every experience by heaping up all items of knowledge on top of one another, every fall they performed a seasonal cleansing in the cavities of their brains. Hence they owed their ability to survive under such convoluted conditions, not to adamantly clinging on to one fixed memory, but rather to destroying their former memories to create fresh new ones. As for matrimony, there too, just like in nature, being able to do the same things for years on end was only possible if one retained the ability to forget having being doing the same things for years on end. That's why, while those with weak memories and messy records were able to bandage much more easily the wounds inflicted throughout the history of their affair, those who constantly and fixedly thought about the good old days and yearned for the wo/men they married were bound to have a tough time in coming to grips with the fact that 'today' would not be like 'yesterday'. The miraculous formula of love was to have a mortal memory, one that dithered and wavered incessantly.

Yet, that day standing by the door with two cups of ashure in her hands, HisWifeNadia had not been able to thwart a particular sc.r.a.p of information long forgotten in its return to her consciousness. She had remembered. As she stood there watching her husband flirt with another woman, she had recalled how doting he had once been toward her as well, that is, what a different man he once was. Even worse than remembering this, was the observation that his tenderness was in fact not a thing of the past and that he could still behave courteously. He was perfectly capable of acting, if not becoming, altered. If Professor Kandinsky were here, he would have probably found the incident too preposterous to bother with. The apt.i.tude to renew memory by erasing previously stored knowledge was a merit germane to the tiny t.i.tmice, not to unhappily married women.

HisWifeNadia had then taken a step inside, her gaze irresolutely wandering, if only for a minute, over the lovers still unaware of her, still reading fortune in a coffee cup giggling and cooing. As she gaped, first at both of them and then the woman alone, she had found herself immersed in a scientifically dubious contention which was once of profound concern to her: 'If and when you look attentively at someone unable to see you, unaware of your presence, be a.s.sured that she will soon feel uneasy and abruptly turn around to see her seer.'

However, before the other woman had a chance to do so, it was Metin Chetinceviz who would notice HisWifeNadia standing there. With visible panic he had jumped to his feet. Struggling hard to adjust his gleefully relaxed body to this brusque shift, he had hobbled a few steps only to make it as far as the centre of the room, where he had come to a full stop. In an attempt to make his body a portiere drawn in between the two women, he had stood there wriggling for a moment, not knowing which side to turn to. Not only his mind but his face too had bifurcated as he struggled to simultaneously give a cajoling smile to his lover, whom he had always treated gently, and frown at his wife, whom he was used to treating coa.r.s.ely. Unable to cling on to this dual mission any longer, he had grabbed his stinking amber briefcase, along with his wife's hand and hustled both outside. Their quarrel that night had been no shoddier than the ones before, except that it had lasted longer. HisWifeNadia had hitherto been afraid at various instances that her husband might kill her, but now for the first time she had felt she too could kill him. Oddly enough, this gruesome feeling had not seemed that gruesome at all.

What was truly gruesome for HisWifeNadia was to know nothing about this other woman. Since she had no acquaintances among Metin Chetinceviz's colleagues, getting this precious information would be more arduous than she thought. Startlingly, she could not even describe her to anyone for however hard she tried, the woman's face remained hazy in her memory. Still not giving up, she had made oodles of plans each more complex than the previous one, and kept calling the studio with new excuses under different names each time. When unable to attain anything like that, she had started going to the studio every day, wasting four hours on the road, just to patrol around the building. She sure knew that her husband would break her legs if he ever spotted her around here but even this dire peril had not urged her to give up.

'The gravest damage psychopharmacology has wrought on humanity is its obsession with cleansing the brain from its quirks.'

According to Professor Kandinsky, the human brain functioned like a possessive housewife priding herself on her fastidiousness. Whatever stepped inside its house, it instantly seized, remarkably vigilant of preserving her order. That, however, was no easy task since, like many such possessive housewives, so too did the brain have several unruly, cranky kids, each of whom were baptized under the name of a distinct mental defect. Whenever any one of these kids started to crawl around, sprinkling crumbs and creating a mess all over the house, the brain would crack up with apprehension, worrying about the disruption of her order. It was precisely at this point that psychopharmacology stepped into the stage. To solve the quandary it tried to stop the toddling child and, when that failed, it took the child by the ear and dragged him outside: 'If you wish to control uncontrollable movements, stop movement altogether! In order to prevent the damage thoughts might generate, bring your patient to a state where he won't think anymore.' Hundreds of drugs and dozens of practices aimed repet.i.tively at this result. The world of medicine, notorious for deeming the physician who invented lobotomy worthy of a n.o.bel, m.u.f.fled ear-piercing screams into an absolute silence, and favoured death over life by taking from the brain's hands the boisterous children whom she indeed found troublesome but held dear nevertheless. According to Professor Kandinsky, there was infinite gain in acknowledging straight out that one could never entirely get rid of his obsessions and all attempts to the contrary were bound to cause far more damage than good. There was nothing wrong in entering into the brain's home and playing according to her rules, as long as the movement inside was not curbed and what was hers was not appropriated from her.

True, the brain could not tolerate seeing her order being upset. Nonetheless, since there was more than one room in her house and more than one memory within her memory, she could certainly confuse what she put where. The interior was like a multi-drawered nightstand. In the top drawer were the undergarments, in the drawer below the folded towels and the laundered bed sheets under that. In this scheme, wherein the place of every obsession and each mania was pre-determined, one should not strive to fully get rid of a fixation somehow acquired. One could, with the aid of science or deliberate absentmindedness, take something out of its drawer and place it in the one above. After all, the fastidious housewife the brain was, it would certainly search for a towel in the fourth drawer, and not in the fifth one where the undergarments were. 'Carefully fold the towels you took out from the front lobe and then leave them in the subcortical centre. Do not ever attempt to wipe out your obsessions for it is not possible. Rather, suffice to put them at a place where you cannot find them. Let them stay in the wrong drawer. You will soon forget. Until your brain accidentally finds them again one day while searching something else...'

Though she was well aware of making her professor's bones shudder in his grave, HisWifeNadia had still refused to take her obsession from its corresponding drawer and put it somewhere else. In the following days, she had made frequent calls to the studio her husband worked in, keeping it under surveillance for hours on end. Finally, one day a voice she had not heard before but recognized instantly, intuitively, answered the phone. It was her. 'h.e.l.lo, how can I help you?' she had asked graciously. 'Who is this?!' HisWifeNadia had exclaimed in a voice devoid of fury but blatantly shrill. So harshly and snappily had the question been posed that the other, taken unaware, had immediately told her name. Often, ident.i.ty resembles a reflex becoming some sort of an involuntary reaction to a stimulus. That must be why, when asked to identify themselves, quite a number of people end up involuntarily introducing themselves rather than asking back, 'Who the h.e.l.l are you?'

Upon hearing the name p.r.o.nounced, HisWifeNadia had hung up on her. Once having learned the name and workplace of her compet.i.tor, it had been painless to discover the rest. Before long she was holding two bunches of information about the woman whose details she now had in her possession. First of all, just like Metin Chetinceviz, she did voiceovers on TV. Secondly, she currently did the voiceover for the leading character in a soap opera t.i.tled 'The Oleander of Pa.s.sion'.

On the following day, before the news was broadcast, HisWifeNadia had sat down in the divan with burgundy patterns on a mauve background the reupholstering of which she constantly put off and watched in complete calmness an episode of 'The Oleander of Pa.s.sion'. When it was over, she decided that she simply loathed it. The plot was so absurd and the dialogues so jumbled that even the actors seemed to be suffering. Nonetheless, the next day and at the same time, there she was once again in front of the TV. Ever since then, with every pa.s.sing day and every concluding episode, her commitment, if not immersion, had escalated. Academics researching housewives' addiction to soap operas tend to overlook this, but there can be a variety of reasons for becoming a viewer, some of which are not at all palpable. Before she knew it, HisWifeNadia had become a regular viewer of 'The Oleander of Pa.s.sion'. Soon the soap opera occupied such a prominent place in her daily life that she could barely endure the weekends when it was not broadcast. She hardly questioned her fixation and barely attempted to overcome it. She solely and simply watched, just like that...and months later, as she sat there watching the eighty-seventh episode, she could not help the voice and image of Loretta jumble in her brain.

Though 'satisfactory failure' was an oxymoron, there could still be unsatisfactory successes in life. Professor Kandinsky was fond of saying he was both 'unsatisfied' and 'successful'; which was better off than many others, he would add, especially those who were both satisfied and successful: for that specific condition was germane to either the dim-witted or the exceptionally lucky. As excess luck ultimately stupefied, the end result was the same. Nevertheless, toward the end of his life, the professor too had tasted a breakdown. Both the dissatisfaction and the failure grabbing him stemmed from the same cause: 'The Theory of the Threshold Skipping Species,' a project he had been working on for four years.

Even when wiped out by a catastrophe, bugs still retained an amazing immunity to anything that threatened them with utter extinction. Around 1946 they seemed to have been resilient to only two types of insecticides, whereas by the end of the century they had developed resistance to more than a hundred kinds of insecticides. The species that managed to triumph over a chemical formula skipped a threshold. Not only were they unaffected by the poisons that had destroyed their predecessors, but they ended up, in the long run, producing new species. The crucial issue, Professor Kandinsky maintained, was not as much to discover how on earth bugs acquired this particular knowledge as to discover knowledge in its entirety. According to him, those premonitions that were a long source of disappointment for the Enlightenment thinkers, who regarded the social and the natural sciences as one totality, would be realised in the century that was just arriving, along with its catastrophes. Humans too were sooner or later bound to skip a threshold. Not because they were G.o.d's beloved servants, as the pious believed, not because they possessed the adequate mental capacity, as the rationalists a.s.sumed, but mainly because they too were condemned to the same 'Circle of Knowledge' as G.o.d and bugs. The societal nature of bugs' lives and the intuitive nature of human civilizations had been attached to each other with and within the same durable chain: sociobiology. Consequently, just as artists weren't as inventive as supposed, nor was nature aloof from craftsmanship. To stay alive, whenever they could, c.o.c.kroaches and writers drew water from the same pool of knowledge and intuition.

'I doubt if they have read even the first page,' Professor Kandinsky had roared when the news of his report being rejected had reached him. It was a week before his death. They had sat side by side on the steps of the little used exit door of the laboratory where they worked together a colossal building where Russia's gifted biologists worked systematically for thirteen hours a day. Yet from a distance, it was hard to tell how huge it was for it had been built three floors under the ground. Since the feeling of being among the chosen brings people closer to each other, everyone inside was highly polite to one another. Only Professor Kandinsky was unaffected by the molecules of graciousness circulating in the air. Not only did he decline to smile at others but also sealed his lips except when forced to utter a few words. He had little tolerance for people, the only exception being Nadia Onissimovna who had been his a.s.sistant for nine years and who had won his confidence with her submissiveness as much as her industriousness. Professor Kandinsky was as cantankerous and reticent as he was glum and impatient. Deep down, Nadia Onissimovna suspected he was not as grumpy as he seemed, and even if he was, he had probably turned into a wreck of nerves only as a result of conducting electrically charged experiments day and night for years. Even back in those days she couldn't help but seek plausible excuses for the coa.r.s.e behaviour of those she loved.

'They don't know what they're doing to me! Failure isn't a virus I'm acquainted with! I have no resistance to it.'

Two security guards were smoking further down by the grey walls surrounding the wide field of the laboratory. The gale was blowing so hard that their smoke could not hover in the air for even a second.

'Some nights I hear the bugs laughing at me, Nadia, but I cannot see them. In my dreams I meander into the empty pantries of empty houses. The bugs manage to escape just before the strike of lightning or the start of an earthquake. They migrate in marching armies. Right now, even as we speak, they are here somewhere near. They never stop.'

A week later, he was found dead in his house: an electrical leakage, a unfussy end... Nadia Onissimovna always reckoned he had died at the most appropriate moment. Fortunately he would never learn what had happened to his laboratory. First, the experiments had been stopped due to financial restrictions and then numerous people were fired. Nadia Onissimovna also received her share of this turmoil. When she met Metin Chetinceviz, she had been unemployed for eight months.

Metin Chetinceviz was a total nuisance, one of the last types a woman would like to fall in love with. Unfortunately, Nadia Onissimovna was so inexperienced with men that even after spending hours with him, she had still not realized she was with one of the last types a woman would like to fall in love with. Anyhow that night, she had been dazed by the incomprehensible enormity, the bold crowds and the ceaseless booming noise of the discotheque she had stepped into for the first time, had thrown up all the drinks she had and was therefore in no condition to realize anything. She was there by chance; having been dragged by one of her girlfriends, from whom she hoped to borrow money by the end of the night. Metin Chetinceviz was among a group of businessmen coming from Istanbul. By the tenth minute of their encounter, before Nadia Onissimovna could comprehend what was going on, the tables were joined, women she was not acquainted with were added to these men she did not know, and a deluge of drinks was ordered. While the rest of the table rejoiced in laughing at everything, she had shrunk into one corner and drank as never before in her life. A little later, when everyone else scampered onto the dance floor in pairs, she saw a swarthy man sitting still, distressed and lonely just like her. She smiled. So did he. Encouraged by these smiles they exchanged a few words. Both spoke English terribly. Yet English is the only language in the world capable of giving the impression that it might be spoken with a little push, even when one has barely any knowledge of it. Thus in the following hours, rolling their eyes as if hoping for the words they sought to descend from the ceiling, snapping their fingers and drawing imaginary pictures in the air with their hands; doodling on napkins, sketching symbols on each other's palms, giggling whenever they paused; opening up whenever they giggled and continuously nodding their heads up and down; Nadia Onissimovna and Metin Chetinceviz plunged into one long, deep conversation.

'Rather than marry a Turk, I'd lick a crammed-full ashtray on an empty stomach every morning.'

'You can lick whatever you want,' Nadia Onissimovna had replied impishly. ' "Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man." '

'Do not recklessly scatter in my kitchen the teachings of Jesus as if they were epigrams of that untrustworthy professor of yours,' her aunt had bellowed, as she blew on the ladle she had been stirring for the last fifteen minutes in a greenish soup.

'You know nothing about him,' Nadia Onissimovna had muttered shrugging her shoulders. 'Only prejudice...'

'I can a.s.sure you that I do know what I need to know, honey,' her aunt had pontificated sprinkling salt in concentric circles onto the pot. 'And if you had not wasted your most beautiful years chasing ants with a good-for-nothing nutter, you too would know what I know.' She pulled a stool by the oven and, jangling her bracelets, kept stirring the soup. Due to varicose veins, she could not stand up for more than ten minutes. 'At least you must know that Turks don't drink wine,' she said with a distraught expression, but it was hard to determine what distressed her more, the subject matter or the soup's still refusing to boil.

Desperate to object, Nadia Onissimovna had started to recount, though with a dash of exaggeration, the whiskies, beers and vodkas her future husband had consumed at the discotheque, refraining from mentioning how he had mixed them all and the outcome.

'Whisky is another story. Do they drink wine? Tell me about that. No, they don't! If they did, they wouldn't have destroyed the fountain of Leon the Sage when they captured Zavegorod. The fountain gushing wine for three hundred years was raised to the ground when the Turks got hold of it. Why did they destroy that gorgeous fountain? Because it gushed wine instead of water! The Turks tore down its wall with axes. Idiots! They thought they would unearth a cellar crammed with barrels of wine somewhere down there but you know what they found instead? A bunch of grapes! Hear me well, Nadia, I say a bunch of grapes! And only three among them had been squeezed. Apparently with only one grape, wine flowed out of the fountain for a century. What did the Turks do when they saw this miracle? Did they appreciate it? No way! They demolished the walls, broke the fountain and even destroyed the grape bunches. They don't honour wine, don't honour things sacred and don't honour the Sage.' Still grumbling she had shaken the ladle toward her niece. 'They don't honour women anyhow!'

When coming to Istanbul, Nadia Onissimovna had not fantasized at all about the milieu that would be awaiting her. In spite of this, she couldn't help feeling disappointed when she saw Bonbon Palace for the first time. Not that the apartment building she was going to live in from now on was more dilapidated than the ones she had lived in so far. If anything, it was more or less the same. That was the issue anyhow, this sameness. For moving somewhere brand new only to encounter there a pale replica of your old life is a good reason to be disappointed. To top it all, there was neither a sandy beach nearby, nor a job for an entomologist, but the gravest problem was Metin Chetinceviz himself. For one thing, he had lied. He did not even have a proper job. He made a living by doing minor voiceovers at irregular intervals for various TV channels. In addition, he occasionally went to weddings, circ.u.mcision ceremonies or birthday parties of affluent families to perform the shadow theatre Karagoz. He kept his reeking leather puppets in his amber coloured briefcase, but lately Bonbon Palace had started to stink so awfully that the smell of the leather puppets was nothing compared to the smell of garbage surrounding the apartment building.

To cap it all, His WifeNadia soon realized how badly mistaken her aunt had been. Metin Chetinceviz glugged down low-price low-quality wine at a rate even the miraculous grapes of Leon the Sage could not compensate for. When drunk he lost not only his temper but also the ability to work. If doing a voiceover, he forgot the text; if performing with the shadow theatre, he stirred up a ruckus by making his puppets talk gobbledygook, peppered with slang and slander. At the weddings he attended, as he played the puppets, behind the shadow screen he gobbled down every drink in his reach, causing a disgrace by the end of the day. Once he had been kicked out for hurling from the mouth of the puppet named 'Hacivat', lascivious jokes and loutish insinuations about the groom in front of the guests. Since those witnessing his scandals never gave him work again, he incessantly had to set up new job contacts.

Still Nadia Onissimovna did not go back. She stayed here at Bonbon Palace. Even she herself could not fathom when and how she had internalized the role of a housewife she had started performing temporarily, with the idea that this would only be until she found an appropriate job. One day the writing on a wedding invitation captivated her attention: 'We wish Metin Chetinceviz and His Wife Nadia to join us on our happiest day.' She stared at the letter blankly, there and then realizing that she was not 'Nadia Onissimovna' anymore, not 'Nadia Chetinceviz' either, but 'HisWifeNadia'. Though shaken by this discovery, she still did not attempt to make any significant changes in her life. The days had for so long been impossible to tell apart, as if they were all photocopies of a particular day now long gone. She cooked, cleaned the house, watched TV, looked at old photographs, and when bored, she made something other housewives might not know much about: potato lamps that lit up without being plugged in. Both Professor Kandinsky and his 'threshold skipping species' had remained behind in another life.

'Why can't I remember my past? I wish I knew who I was. Why can't I remember, why?' moaned Loretta spinning in her hands the daisy which was in her hair a minute ago.

'You're searching for it in the wrong drawer, honey! Look at the one below, the one below!' yelled HisWifeNadia, without noticing that she repeated the gesture on the screen, spinning in her hands the latest potato lamp she had fabricated.

It was precisely then that she heard a sound by the door. He was coming. Earlier than usual today. He would probably munch a bit, take a nap and then go out again in the evening, taking his smelly briefcase with him. You could never tell when would he come or leave, but no matter what hour of the day it was, he never cared to ring the doorbell.

As the key wiggled in the lock, HisWifeNadia grabbed the remote and switched the channel. When Metin Chetinceviz appeared at the door, Loretta had already been replaced by a cooking programme. A woman with a wide forehead, round face and a remarkable moustache was busy tasting the spinach au gratin she had just removed from the oven.

Flat Number 1: Musa, Meryem, Muhammet.

Keeping an eye on the door for Muhammet's return, Meryem embraced her swollen belly with her dimpled arms and heaved a deep sigh. That day, she had again had success in sending her son to school but G.o.d knows what he would look like when he returned home. In the beginning Muhammet used to tell her in great detail everything that happened in school, be it good or bad. Yet he had sunk into arrant silence over time. What her son did not put into words, Meryem heard anyhow from his troubled eyes, or the split seams and ripped out b.u.t.tons of his school outfit, or the bruises on his arms. As she listened her worries soared. The thought that somebody might be hitting her son, be it a child or a grownup, killed her; his own father had not yet given him a flick. Only Meryem, she alone had slapped him a few times, may Allah forgive her, and occasionally pinched him too but that was different. As a matter of fact, ever since she had discovered that others had been 'roughing-up' her son, Meryem had refrained from even this minimal disciplining. When in her mind's eye she saw children raining blows on her son, her blood boiled. There was a time when she thought it was nothing other than a simple scuffle among children and yet weeks and months had pa.s.sed without any change for good. What infuriated Meryem the most was not so much her son's being smacked by his peers as seeing how he gradually became indifferent to torment.

As to why her son was relentlessly bullied she had a hard time unravelling. Was it because he was a janitor's son? But she had sounded out the neighbourhood kinfolk who held the same job and found out that their children faced no such calamity at school. What else then? Muhammet was neither fatter nor uglier nor more dim-witted than the other kids so why couldn't he struggle against the wicked? In despair she eyed her swollen belly. The answer, she knew too well, was right under her nose: it was because of Musa. Blood takes after blood, they said. Muhammet was his father's son, brazenly compliant and docile. Even a wee bit of his mother's splendid bulk had not been bequeathed to him; he was so tiny, so short and wiry. For years she had force-fed the boy five times a day, making him eat a soft-boiled egg every morning, but to no avail. Not only had he not put on weight or grown taller, he still looked at least two years younger than his peers. True, Muhammet had always been pet.i.te, but his frame had shrunk visibly since he had started elementary school and thereafter to b.u.t.t into the barricade of his peers' scorn.

When Muhammet put on the school outfit that was tailored a size larger so that he could still wear it in the years to follow, and shouldered that huge knapsack of his, so noticeably did he dwindle that everyone who saw him in that state scolded Meryem for not waiting another year before sending him to school. When next to his peers Muhammet's runtiness became all the more striking as if he was held under a magnifying gla.s.s. He was the smallest child in his cla.s.s and, of course, in the entire school. Had this been the only problem, Meryem would not have made such an issue of it. She would have simply patched over her yearning for a son as robust as a pine tree and awe-inspiring as a sultan's skiff; one who could squeeze the water out of a stone and make whomever he frowned at shake in their shoes, yet at the same time possessed a heart so soft to take care of his by then senile mother. Despite Meryem's visions, not only had Muhammet proved to be his father's son in terms of physical frame, he had started to acquire the latter's habits as well. Oddly enough, even though from cradle to school he had been glued to his mother and had an at-all-times-asleep-or-sleepy man for a father, as soon as released from his mother's wings, the person Muhammet ended up taking after was none other than his father. That was what troubled Meryem the most. After all, she firmly believed that if Musa had a roof over his head and a job to keep him fed, it was all thanks to her. Musa had hitherto been able to stand on his feet precisely because he had handed himself over to his wife. What if his son was not so lucky? What if life did not present Muhammet with another Meryem? Then there was no way could he survive in Istanbul. This city would give him a beating worse than the one he now got from his peers.

Lost in her thoughts, Meryem started to grind her teeth. This she did rarely now, only when truly distraught or confused. Yet as a child she used to grind her teeth so much at nights that she would wake up everyone in the household. Her great grandmother was alive then; alive and so old that her emaciated body had been entirely cleansed of the dual malady of angst and haste. One day she had sat Meryem down to warn her that only when she learned to be patient could she ever leave her teeth alone, otherwise she would be of no use in life, and just as she robbed people of their sleep today, she would rob them of their peace of mind tomorrow. The way to learn to be patient was through learning how to fill up a 'patience sack.' This required an empty sack, which should be left somewhere high, tied sidewise to the end of a stick like a banner. Meryem, who was no older than Muhammet at that time, had listened to this counsel attentively and fast as a rabbit climbed up the roof of the coal cellar in the garden, where she hang an empty sack to a broom with great difficulty. As the wind blew, the empty sack would acc.u.mulate various things inside, filling up bit by bit in time. As such, the only thing Meryem was expected to do was wait without doing anything and as she waited, to make sure she did not forget what she was waiting for. This was what they called 'patience.'

Yet even at that age Meryem was impulsive, not to mention alarmingly impatient. Whenever faced with a challenge, she would do everything in her power to beat it. Filling up the 'patience sack' had been no exception. In the days to follow, she would check the sack first thing in the morning only to come down the ladder disappointed each time. The burden of not doing anything was so unbearable that each night in her sleep she would carry buckets of soil to fill sack upon sack. As this dream labour had made her teeth grating even worse than before, the nights had turned into a nightmare for the entire household. Her great grandmother was despondent, her grandmother baffled and her mother infuriated. All three women kept talking about a prophet named Eyup.

'OK, I'll wait, but tell me for how long?' Meryem wanted to know. 'Until the sack fills up by itself,' suggested her great grandmother; 'Until you are ready,' snarled her grandmother; 'Until the sack is filled and you are ready,' concluded her mother. In the meanwhile, her father, sick and tired of the four generations of women at the house and this sack business of theirs which was getting nowhere, had already brought down the wooden ladder. 'Waiting without doing anything' counting for nothing in her book, Meryem had only been able to endure two weeks without climbing to look inside the sack. After two weeks, when no one was at home, she had carried the kitchen table out to the garden, placed a chair on top, hopped onto the roof of the coal cellar and stuck her head inside this sack of patience. Then and there she had seen the outcome of what they called patience: dry leaves, th.o.r.n.y shrubs, broken branches and two dead b.u.t.terflies...such were the rewards of those who endured: either a handful of dry twigs or the lethal wounds of the prophet Eyup...

That was it. After that day, she had stopped peeping into the sack and had never given it a second thought. Waiting leniently was not meant for her. Had that not been the case, Meryem would not have married Musa but waited instead for Isa, her favourite among her other suitors, to return from Istanbul. However, instead of waiting for Isa to come back 'G.o.dknowswhen', she had decided to come to Istanbul herself and to this end married Musa, dragging him along. Unfortunately, once they were back in the city things had not gone at all as she had expected. Realizing Musa wasn't going to be able to cope with Istanbul, Meryem had found herself remembering after all these years her great grandmother's Patience Sack. There was no way she was going to sit back and wait for the wind to fill up the sack, Musa to mature and life to bring them a few dead b.u.t.terflies or dry twigs. Instead she would take charge of their destiny. As for Musa, his wife's industriousness, enterprising skill and willpower would leave a chilling effect on his nerves, rendering him more and more weak-kneed, sluggish and pessimistic. Subsequently, once in Istanbul, Musa and Meryem had turned into two opposite tides, just like the waters of the Bosphorus. This contrast in their dispositions was further reflected in their appearance. In the years to follow, while Meryem, tall and big boned to start with, gained day by day more and more weight, Musa shrunk like a hand-knitted sweater laundered in the wrong cycle.

Not that Meryem expected anything from her husband, having by now resigned herself to the man he had become. At night, half an hour before the arrival of the garbage truck, she collected the bagged trash from the flats of the Flea Palace and distributed in the morning their bread and newspaper. The latter she finished early in the morning so there would be time left for her scuffle with Muhammet, as well as for fortune-telling. She lingered before work while having her coffee, but once she got going, did not easily stop. Five days a week she went to five different flats for housecleaning. Though by now in the fifth month of her pregnancy, the sum total of her activities had not lessened a bit. Perhaps she now went up the stairs more slowly but that was all. Her energy resembled her weight; however much she ran around it didn't decrease a bit. Similarly, her fort.i.tude resembled her energy; like a machine in perpetual motion she kept turning her own wheel.

Every so often it occurred to her she would actually be better off without Musa. Had she received the news that Musa was dead hit by a car, she would of course have been distraught with sorrow but her life would not go astray; in point of fact, it would not even change. Yet if she were the one hit, Musa would be smashed to smithereens as if the car had hit not his wife's body but the mainspring of his own life and livelihood. Though Meryem struggled hard not to think such inauspicious things, she couldn't help doing so...and the more her pregnancy moved ahead, the more fixated she became on the ghastly thoughts parading full force in her mind.

Lately she had been more and more scared of outlandish apprehensions, having nightmares upon nightmares, waking up every morning her heart pummelling, agonized by the thought that something ominous might happen at any moment. Given her score in the Patience Sack episode, how could she be expected to wait pa.s.sively for evil to come her way? Thus she took precautions. If researchers conducting ethnological a.n.a.lyses on the birth customs and beliefs in Turkey had, instead of surveying each and every village and town, simply come across Meryem, they would indeed have obtained the same data with much less expense and effort.

Meryem's package of precautions concerning birth came under three cl.u.s.ters: Never do those things that should never be done.

Be careful in doing those things that need caution.

Do those things that are felicitous as much as possible.

Those 'things that should never be done' had no explanation and no justification for their categorisation. Just as one should not clip nails at night, one should not interpret dreams then either. As the mysteries of dreams are barely comprehensible even in plain daylight, how could one possibly interpret them in the darkness of the night? Meryem never left her nail clippings around, always throwing them into the toilet to make sure no one else would get hold of them. Likewise she frequently checked and collected the hairs on hairbrushes and then burnt them. If a single strand of her hair accidentally fell some place outside her house, she would immediately pick it up and put it in her bosom. She was particularly sensitive about hair and nails, holding the belief that these were the only two things in the human body which continued to live for sometime, even after the body they belonged to pa.s.sed away. According to Meryem you shouldn't take a knife from anyone's hand, leave a pair of scissors open, bring to the tip of your tongue the name of the living while pa.s.sing by a cemetery, speak of animals in a room where the Qur'an was kept, mumble a song and if possible, you shouldn't even open your mouth when waking up to go to the bathroom where the jinni gather at night, or kill spiders... The list of the things you should avoid doing extended interminably and births were accorded a special place on this list. Women had to be watched both during pregnancy and for forty days after the birth and the placenta of the baby needed to be buried deep under earth. Though Meryem had not been able to convince that spectacled, cold fish of a physician to dig a hole for Muhammet's placenta in the garden of the hospital where she had given birth, thanks to the goofy nurse she had eventually emerged triumphant. Deaths, too, were as sensitive as births. When visiting someone on their deathbed, Meryem addressed the patient by different names one after another to bamboozle the Angel of Death. If she still could not fool Azrael and the patient died, she would give away every single item of the deceased's clothing to a peddler of old clothes whom the former had never met. If the peddler committed the mistake of uttering a few words of courtesy about the departed one, she would instantly take the clothes away from him to give them to another.

After all, anonymity lay at the essence of the profession of peddlerhood. On a peddler's cart one should never know which goods were left by whom, in point of fact, one should not even think that they once upon a time belonged to someone. The n.o.ble task of delivering familiar clothes to unfamiliar people was inc.u.mbent upon the peddler. Ultimately, while those who gave away these clothes needed to get rid of their past, those who purchased them didn't want to know anything about that past. In between the two groups of people crisscrossed the peddlers, cleansing personal items of all the memories they had gone through and the poignant ends they had met, so that they could start life anew. That's the way it had to be so that the old could yield the new and death engender life. Actually, if asked to name the most consecrated professions on earth, Meryem would name the peddler before the teacher or the physician. Not that she wanted Muhammet to become a packman but she sure felt deep affection for these men carting away the remnants of a dispersed home or a departed acquaintance, to then bring from afar others' goods, and thus steadily, spontaneously mixing up bits and pieces of Istanbul's seven hills and motley communities.

As for the 'things-that-required-care', it was better not to do them at all but if you had to you should at least take precautions. One should refrain from sewing a cloth on a person, for instance. Alternatively, one should bring an object that could counterbalance any misfortune the needle might bring. That's why whenever Meryem sewed a cloth on someone's body, she would put a wooden spoon in her mouth. If she accidentally broke a mirror, she would instantly go and buy another one, and since fire could be fought with fire, smash that mirror into pieces as well. Nonetheless she would rather have as little contact as possible with mirrors, each being a silvered sealed gate to the unknown. Since she deemed it inauspicious to see one's image repeatedly, the only mirror in their house always faced the wall. As for normal doors, she paid great care when pa.s.sing through them. Even cemeteries did not scare her as much as thresholds. When pa.s.sing through a door, she would never ever step on the threshold, opening her legs to the widest step possible and always with the right foot first. Differentiating her right from her left was a constant concern for her anyhow. When at the table, she would place a piece of bread to her right side to feed the eyes of those who coveted the bounty of their table. Reserving her left hand for the dirtiest jobs, she took great care to turn from her right when someone called her name on the street, hung up her clothing from right to left as if writing in Arabic and always made sure she got up from the right side of the bed. Though this inevitably meant that Musa would have to get up from the left side, he did not seem to care about this as long as his sleep was uninterrupted.

All day long, Meryem collected premonitions and read signs. It was good portent if her right eye twitched but she instantly got wary if her left eye did so. A ringing in her right ear was good news but she would start to worry about her fate when the ringing was in the left one. Itchy feet was a sign of a journey on the way, itchy palms meant money and an itchy throat suggested a tight spot. If she got goose b.u.mps, Meryem suspected that jinn were nearby. As for tea leaves...if an unexpected tealeaf escaped the sieve and appeared in her tea, Meryem would expect a visitor that same day. From the leaf's shape, she would try to surmise the ident.i.ty of the guest and from its colour their intention. If a dog howled after midnight she forlornly concluded someone would soon be dead. Yet she was no longer as resolute about this matter as she used to be since a dopey, skin-and-bones medical student had moved into the flat across from hers with his ogre of a dog.

Meryem resorted to the coffee cup in order to find out the calamities beyond her grasp. Morning coffee was reserved for fortune telling and night coffee for the simple pleasure of drinking it. Recently she had formed the habit of topping-up her night coffee with three thimblefuls of banana liqueur. It was that Blue Mistress in Flat 8 who had introduced her to this liqueur business. There were all types of liqueur there, lined up with olive oil bottles of all sizes. She had made Meryem taste each and every one. The raspberry was scrumptious and the mint left a pleasant freshness in one's mouth, but it was the banana liqueur that Meryem had relished the most and could have drunk in heaps if only she weren't concerned about harming the baby. Mistaking Meryem's hesitation for fear of sin the Mistress had chuckled: 'Who says a liqueur is an alcoholic drink?!' Meryem had instantly grabbed on to this explanation: a liqueur was not an alcoholic drink after all. 'If you like them so much, go ahead and take the banana liqueurs with you,' the mistress had urged. Her man brought new ones anyhow. Meryem had seen him a couple of times: old enough to be her father and married on top of it. She had made no comment on the matter, however, for she considered private matters truly private.

Yet there were other things she could hardly stay away from no matter how much she tried. The evil eye, for instance; it was like an echo. Just as one could not detect the original voice behind an echo, one could not track down the source of the evil eye either. Fearing an attack from four different directions in forty different ways, Meryem had equipped every corner of the house with preventive measures. On the walls, she hung evil eye beads, prayer placards, horseshoes; she sprinkled and scattered holy water from Mecca, salt lumps or blessed black c.u.min seeds under the pillows, behind doors and especially in Muhammet's pockets; she kept tortoise sh.e.l.ls, crab legs and horse chestnuts over the thresholds, and had charms written on almonds, dates, copper plates, all types of paper and animal skins. By now both Musa and Muhammet had become accustomed to living with this ever expanding hodgepodge concoction of items, most of which constantly changed location. Still, none of these precautions could ease Meryem's fear of the evil eye even a wee bit. At different times during the day, when a sudden sorrow settled in her heart, she instantly broke a plate inside the kitchen sink. If hot water cracked a gla.s.s cup, she concluded the curse of the evil eye was on her family and spun salt over fire. When she b.u.mped into someone whose eyes looked menacingly blue, she surrept.i.tiously covered Muhammet's face with her hands and if Muhammet happened to be away, closed her own eyes thinking of him. The thought that the curse of the evil eye might touch upon her son terrified her. Thus ever since he was a baby, Muhammet lived his life going around with amulets pinned to his undershirt and blessed black c.u.min seeds in his pockets; finding papers covered with Meryem's scrawl under his pillow; getting under a sheet once every ten days, its four corners held by four women while melted lead in cold water was poured over his head to break a spell. Muhammet would readily endure all of these things as long as he was not forced to eat eggs.

Having spent the interval between six months and six years being spoon-fed a soft-boiled egg every d.a.m.n morning, Muhammet had a small problem with eggs. What he found even worse than their taste was their sh.e.l.ls being used as complaint pet.i.tions. Every morning, once the egg was eaten and the sh.e.l.l was sparklingly clean inside, Meryem had penned on the sh.e.l.l whatever complaint had been left over from the day before: 'Yesterday Muhammet lied to his mother, but he will never ever do so again,' 'Yesterday he did not want to eat his egg, but he will never ever do so again,' 'Yesterday Muhammet cursed the auntie who poured the lead, but he will never ever do so again...'. These empty egg sh.e.l.ls were each time thrown to the birds so that they could take these complaints to the two angel clerks recording on their celestial registers all the sins and good deeds committed on earth. Until the day he started elementary school, every morning before breakfast Muhammet would peek out of the window to see his winged informants. Yet each time he did this, the only species of birds he could spy were either the screeching sparrows perched upon the branches of the rose acacia in the garden or the ugly crows recklessly hunting the streets. There was also the caged canary inside the window of Flat Number 4 but that bird could not even flap its wings, let alone fly.

It was the seagulls Muhammet was suspicious of. He spotted them as they dug into the garbage bags acc.u.mulating by the side of the garden wall. In the damp breath of lodos, they drew circles as they descended onto the trash piles and it seemed to Muhammet that each time they chanced upon a precious piece of information they would then glide into the sky squawking with pleasure. At nights, they gathered together on the roofs to watch the sins committed in the apartment buildings of Istanbul. Unlike his father, seagulls never went to sleep.

Flat Number 2: Sidar and Gaba.

He opened the door with a grim look on his face. It was not s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the anatomy exam that upset him so much, but the fact that he had taken the anatomy exam in the first place, knowing only too well he would screw it up. He now profoundly regretted that when waking this morning, on realizing the alarm clock had again failed to go off, rather than hitting the pillow he had scurried out of the house and paid for a cab to boot. He even more profoundly regretted that after the exam he had joined his friends, who were cl.u.s.tered like pigeons flocking to wheat, to learn how each had answered every single question, to then complain unanimously about the instructor and then the whole university structure. To top it all off, once having joined them, he had ended up spending the entire day in cafes amidst non-stop chatter. Now he regretted all the energy he had so lavishly squandered. Energy, Sidar reckoned, was a finite commodity, like an eye lotion in a tiny dropper. Accordingly, he spent no more than two drops a day, one to wake up in the morning and the other to go to sleep at night.

Closing the outside door behind him without turning on the hall light, he found himself engulfed in darkness. He must have forgotten to draw the curtains back when he left hurriedly in the morning. Not that it would have made much difference, as its miniature windows were at ground level, this squat, narrow bas.e.m.e.nt floor could get only a morsel of light. Cursing the dim-wit who had placed the switch two metres further in from the entrance, Sidar wobbled in. He could not get far, however, as his pa.s.sage was blocked by the hefty silhouette emerging behind him. As the two b.u.mped into one another, Sidar lost his balance, lurched forward hitting his head against the thick pipe pa.s.sing right through the middle of the living room. Scared out of his mind, he reached the switch...and frowned at Gaba...Having got what he wanted, Gaba, on the other hand, was happily chewing on the simit he had s.n.a.t.c.hed from his pocket.

Rubbing his head Sidar reclined on the sofa. Since the dirty, dusty pipe pa.s.sed right through the middle of the living room which also served as his bedroom, dining room and study just at his ear level, he kept banging his head at the same spot. Just this morning, while rushing to leave the house he had b.u.mped his head again, and if it went on like this he would soon have a b.u.mp there. Fortunately, as soon as he stretched out on the sofa, his grumpiness faded out. He so much enjoyed being at home. Here he could stay away from the turmoil that plagued every corner in Istanbul; as long as he was home, contrary to the world outside he could remain entirely still and utterly calm, just like Gaba did when his hunger was fully satiated.

It was particularly during late afternoon periods that the insularity reigning in Flat 2 became all the more blatant. Around this time every day, an excruciating mayhem swallowed Bonbon Palace. As the immediate surroundings a.s.sumed the hullabaloo of a fairground synchronized by the brazen honks of the cars caught in traffic, the howls of the children playing at the park and the yells of the street peddlers the melange of sounds seeped in through the cracks and crevices of Bonbon Palace, getting hold of each and every flat except this one. It wasn't only the clamour that failed to penetrate Flat 2; the heat waves could not break through either. Getting almost no sunlight, the house was cool as a cellar during the summer when all other flats burned up. Likewise, the sour smell of garbage tormenting all the other residents was least detectable down here.

The truth is that when Bonbon Palace was built, Flat 2 had been designed not as a residence but a storage area, and had been used as such for many years. However, after the death of the owner, when the control of the apartment building had pa.s.sed onto his daughter who had preferred to take care of everything from afar, this place too had received its share in the changes that occurred, each more problematic than the former. During the disarray that had prevailed, such huge fights had erupted when each and every neighbour attempted to pile their unused personal belongings up in this narrow s.p.a.ce, that no one had the good fortune to use it for a long time. In the end, upon the instructions received from France, this stumpy, narrow, single-room bas.e.m.e.nt floor was rented out at half the amount of rent of the other flats. From then on, a myriad of people had taken shelter here: people blatantly different from one another but with poverty and bachelorhood in common. Among these were, in the following order: a local radio news announcer living on chicken sandwiches three times a day; a depressed accountant whose best friend had s.n.a.t.c.hed away his entire bank account along with his wife of eight years; an army deserter who turned the TV on full blast during Ramadan making everyone listen to sermons and hymns; a fishy fellow whose job no one had been able to guess at or d