The Flea Palace Part 7

As I sat on the balcony sipping my drink, 'Why don't you think of something to stop these folks?' Ethel asked, grabbing the railing with fingernails painted a hue of dried apricot. Where she pointed, I spotted a headscarfed woman throwing her garbage by the side of the garden wall.

I shrugged. It doesn't make any difference anymore if I open or close the windows. With the weather warming up every pa.s.sing day the garbage smell gets worse. If exposed to this malodour on the street, one walks faster, if in the car, one rolls the windows up. However, if the house you live in, the morning you wake up into, the night you sleep through, the walls, the windows, the doors and every direction you turn to stinks, then you are trapped. There is no way of stepping outside the yoke of smell. Every night when I return home I encounter yet another warped garbage hill by the side wall of the apartment building. Every night a brand new garbage mound awaits me comprising of stuffed plastic bags of all sizes marked with the emblems of the grocers and markets in the neighbourhood, bags with their tops tied but for some reason always with a hole or slit at the bottom, cardboard boxes tossed here and there, items that once belonged to G.o.dknowswhom, and black clouds of buzzing flies landing on and taking-off from the leaking watermelon juices and scattered sc.r.a.ps. Cats too... dozens of cats loom hither and thither...some skinny, some chubby, all indifferent to pa.s.sers-by, bedridden in their foul-smelling kingdom, basking all day long over, inside and under the garbage bags, as their number increases incessantly, alarmingly...

I watch the garbage hill at various hours of the day. Before noon there already is a substantial pile, which mounts further during the rest of the day. Close to dusk, two gypsies, one juvenile, other elderly, arrive with their handcarts and pick at the garbage. They load tin cans, newspapers and gla.s.s bottles into separate sacks to take them away. Life down there seems to be based on endless repet.i.tion where each part complements one another: the cats dig up what the flies have set their eyes on, the gypsies pick on what the cats have dug up, the garbage truck that enters the street every evening at the rush hour takes away what remains from the gypsies, what the garbage truck scatters, the flies, cats and seagulls swipe at once again. Within this ceaseless rotation whatever diminishes is speedily replenished, never letting that sour smell fade away.

'What do you want me to do?' I asked. 'Should I stand guard by the wall?'

'Do something so drastic that they'll never again want to dump garbage here. Come on sugar-plum, use your brain! You'll think of something,' she said once again finishing her rak before I did.

I leaned back lighting a cigarette. Oddly, there are no ants tonight. As the smoke coiled like gauze in the air, out of the blue, an idea as tiny as a louse crossed my mind.

Flat Number 2: Sidar and Gaba.

Watching Gaba lick the crumbs of the floured cookies with his rough, rose-pink tongue, Sidar couldn't help recalling a particular day of his childhood. It was a snowy Sat.u.r.day. They had paid a visit to grandma, as they always did on Sat.u.r.day mornings, but this time for some reason their visit had been shorter than usual. Ever since they had left the old woman's house, his mother and father had been walking arm-in-arm, murmuring reticently. Sidar, whom no one expected would grow up to be so tall and lanky back in those years, was covered in layers of clothes, lolloping like a cabbage; his reindeer-motif wool beret pulled down to his ears and the same coloured scarf wound around his neck. As the distance between him and his parents who were coming at a snail's pace from behind extended, Sidar took the liberty of tramping through all the puddles on his way. He could thus estimate the graveness of the quiet quarrel between his parents. The only thing adults need to do to make their children sense the inauspiciousness hovering in the air without explicitly declaring the news is simply to not get angry at things that always anger them. Accordingly, Sidar had fathomed something was wrong. For him to be convinced this day was like any other day, he first had to find a deep, dirty mud puddle to march in, and upon doing so, be rebuked by his mother and conceivably slapped by his father.

Before long he came across what he wanted, a russet, murky hole full of mud, the depth of which he could not possibly estimate. Doggedly, almost blindly he stomped in it and would have simply spurted ahead had he not heard an indistinct growl right at that instant. He flinched, checked the surroundings but couldn't see anyone. It was as if the voice had come from under his feet...as if the mud had been hurt... Perhaps it was a warning urging him to stay back. Perhaps this hole in front of him was one of those infamous death holes the munic.i.p.ality dug up to then forget to refill: a brown, bottomless dirty death hole... It frightened him, but the fear of death, Sidar sensed for the first time, was not that frightful. He moved forward.

His heart pounded wildly. How deep was the hole, where was its bottom? Perhaps in a step or two he would be swallowed up... In his mind's eye he visualized his death, the hole gulping him up, leaving behind nothing but his red deer patterned beret. He imagined his mother and father pa.s.sing by the hole, still talking fervently, then returning down all the roads they had pa.s.sed searching for their only son. The more he thought about it the more he took pleasure in making everyone pay for past offences: slanders that had hurt him, squabbles that had injured him, the injustices he had been subjected to... It felt good to envisage how his friends and relatives who had been separately responsible for each one of these slights would repent upon learning he had died.

Yet before he was able to arrive even at the midpoint of his dreams, he had reached the end of the puddle. He grudgingly stepped out and still stomping his feet, dropping burly mud drops, he turned the street corner only to stop there flummoxed. Right across from him, by the sidewalk, lay a puppy. Those blaring sounds had emanated not from the death-hole of the Istanbul munic.i.p.ality but from this puny, black-eyed puppy. It had no blood on its coat, no visible cut or wound. The wheel tracks of the minibus that had sped over it were not detectable. Sidar's face paled. Realizing that the death he had lavishly dreamt of a minute previous was now so close and yet so external to him, he felt stupid. All these visions that carried him away were incongruous and all the aspirations he set up futile. The only things that were real to him at that moment were the mud left on his trousers, which was already drying up, and the pain tormenting this puppy. The rest was entirely meaningless. He had a family but was lonely; he was constantly belittled by everyone and he in turn constantly belittled everyone; he did not know how to be happy and did not think he could learn it either; he had turned eleven but was still a child in everyone's eyes; no one asked his opinion on anything and even if they did, he did not have any opinion anyway.

No doubt he should have returned and asked for help from his parents or else, moved forward to help the puppy himself, but he could do none of these things. He nervously thrust his hands into his pockets and simply waited. The sour despondency of his parents was approaching step by step from the back: this was life. In front of him, a puppy speedily slid from pain into oblivion: that was death. As for Sidar, he did not want to join either side; he would stay as far away as possible from both the death that excluded him and the life from which he had excluded himself. If only he could withdraw behind his eyelids the way he had hidden under the coat, gloves, beret and scarf. Lost in his thoughts it took him some time to realize what the soft thing in his left pocket was. It was a floured cookie.

'The girls will stay with me,' grandma had remarked broodingly that morning. 'But the male child, he has to be by the side of his father.'

When Sidar had entered the kitchen, the two women had their backs to him. They were doling out the freshly baked floured cookies into the porcelain plates lined up on the counter. 'Don't leave me without news,' grandma had mumbled. 'But as soon as your new phone is connected, call a candy store first thing.'

When a new phone was connected at a new house, whom one called first determined all the rest. That was why, with a new phone, before calling friends and relatives, one had to randomly call a candy store so that all the following calls made from that phone would end sweetly. After having talked to a candy store, one could call a bank, foreign currency bureau or a jeweller to bring in money for future phone calls, a real estate agent to bring in a house, or a car dealer to bring in a car and the like, but possessions and such did not matter that much. What really mattered was for the things to run sweetly. Accordingly, while calling all others depended on one's own pleasure, calling the candy store was some sort of a duty.

Sidar had been bored stiff there, as he was every Sat.u.r.day morning. Fortunately they had not stayed for long this time. While the adults had become wobbly with emotion and the children had still not comprehended how different this Sat.u.r.day morning was from others, they had all been swept toward the outside door with the current of such incessant farewells that it was uncertain who kissed whom and why. The only thing apparent was that the girls were to stay behind with the grandmother. Sidar had no objection to this. He was so pleased to learn that he would be spending the weekend away from his sisters' yakking that he had not even objected to his mother's instruction to put on this beret which was made for a girl. However, just as he was about to leave in that covered, wrapped-up state, his grandmother had pulled him to herself fast, stuck him onto her b.r.e.a.s.t.s that touched her belly and keeping hold of him tight like this, she had crammed things into his pocket. 'You'll eat them on the way,' she had snivelled as she sniffed her red nose and pointed with one arm to some place in the sky as if the road she referred to was up there somewhere. In that state she had remained stock-still at the threshold, like a burly statue of a woman turned into stone. With her blocking the door in this way, all family members had lined up next to one another along the narrow corridor like forgotten clothes pinned up on a clothesline and left to freeze outside in the cold of the night.

Always confused when confronted with excessive expressions of love, Sidar had finally succeeded in escaping the mangle of grandma's b.r.e.a.s.t.s that smelt slightly of sweat, intensely of lemon cologne and a whisk of fresh baked bread. That was the exit. From that moment on they had been wandering the streets, he in the front and his mother and father at the back.

As soon as the puppy spotted the floured cookie Sidar took out of his pocket, it stopped wailing. They stood eye-to-eye for an awkward moment. Sidar felt a hatred surge in him; he couldn't help loathing the animal. Here it was on the verge of death and yet the desire to devour a d.a.m.n floured cookie flickered like a flimsy flame in its already l.u.s.treless black eyes.

A couple of minutes later, his father and mother turned the corner. They approached and saw their son indifferently munching on a cookie in front of a dying puppy. Confronted with such cruel insensitivity, the nerves of both adults, which were thoroughly stretched under the influence of the topic they had been talking about, completely snapped. While his mother yelled at him, his father slapped him on the face.

At long last his wish had come true. Both his mother and father seemed to have turned back to their normal selves. Still however, that malignant feeling pulling Sidar apart inside had not lessened a bit. As he started to weep, it was neither the slap nor the rebuke that had hurt him so badly. In truth, on that last Sat.u.r.day morning in Istanbul, his conviction that the life he had become accustomed to would forever continue the way it was, had perished for once and all.

That same night Sidar travelled on a plane for the first time in his life. He would with time comprehend why his mother and father had become so agitated before going through pa.s.sport control and why they had left Turkey in such a hurry. At the end of the trip which he spent watching the charming flight attendant smiling the same smile at everyone, when the plane started to descend, he saw under him a city that scattered bright lights without shadows into a calm darkness: Switzerland!

Two months later, when they had left the school dormitory set aside for those seeking political asylum and settled into the dwelling they were going to share with an a.s.syrian family similarly in asylum, the first thing his mother had done was to run to the phone. She had talked with her daughters in tears, constantly repeating the same sentences over and over again; not a patisserie, not a candy store, nor a chocolate factory... Perhaps because they had used their new phone to call their family first, and to hold a most doleful conversation, throughout the long years that followed, at every single call they received they feared the worst news from Istanbul. Even when grandma died five years later and the girls also arrived in Switzerland this barely changed. In all the phone calls to ensue, there was some news from Istanbul and if not that, certainly a mention and a steady, th.o.r.n.y anguish.

Be that as it may, Sidar was the only one of the family to return to Istanbul, after eleven and a half years and one day...

Flat Number 4: The Firenaturedsons.

Shut in her room, sitting cross-legged on the carpet next to the c.o.c.kroach she had squished, Zelish Firenaturedsons had for the last half hour been staring at the mirror she solemnly and dolefully held, as if some grave injustice had been inflicted upon her by the face she saw there. Until some time ago her face had been as pallid as if she had run into a ghost at night and as round as a pastry tray. Yet, for about five months now, it had been spotted with tiny, ruby blisters as if she had had a heat rash without knowing. The dermatologist with bleary eyes and hearty laughter they visited, diagnosed them as being neither adolescent acne nor an allergy but instead psychosomatic. Under extreme anxiety, he had maintained, the skin could transform itself into a red polka-dotted tablecloth. Chuckling at his own joke, the physician had given Zelish a whopping slap on the back and thundered in his ba.s.s voice: 'For goodness sake, if you get so anxious at this age, you'll end up racking your husband's nerves when married. Relax, my daughter, relax!'

If there is one thing in this life that starts to multiply out of spite and proliferate all the more the moment it is intended to be reduced, it must be anxiety. Even fear has an ending, a saturation point. When that particular point is reached, even if one were up to the neck in fear, one would and could not be frightened any longer. Excessive fear anaesthetizes itself. As for anxiety, that is the venomous water of a bottomless well. It has neither an overdose nor an antidote. Just as much as the source of fear is concrete and evident, the source of anxiety is vague and abstract. As such, even though one would have no trouble determining the reason behind fear, there is no way to detect the cause for constant anxiety. Given that, warning an anxiety-ridden person who is already worn out from battling not some corporal enemy but a chemical one, about the menacing things that might happen if she did not appease her anxiety, would solely serve to create just the opposite effect, rendering her all the more anxious.

Not only did Zelish Firenaturedsons not know how to relax, she did not think she could ever learn either. Finding out that the cause for all these blisters was not a particular allergy but an ambiguous anxiety had simply heaped more angst upon her pile of angst. There was no soap, cream or lotion on earth that could heal her. Anxiety had no cosmetic solution. The blisters. .h.i.therto confined to her forehead and chin had since then increased twofold, spreading all over her face.

All of a sudden she overheard some music seeping through from the flat downstairs. Getting down on her knees, her face turned to the dead c.o.c.kroach, she glued her ear to the floor. By now she had formed the habit of eavesdropping on the flat below at various times of the day. Her room was right above the living room of the wiry guy residing in the bas.e.m.e.nt flat. At times she heard this strange 'tap' and 'rap' as if he had been walking on the ceiling or was taken hostage downstairs and was trying to climb up...or perhaps he was sending her a coded message... Once she had even heard moans jumbled-in with dog barks. That day she had patiently waited by the living room window to see what this female guest looked like. She had seen her. A pet.i.te girl with short, spiked, coppery hair and loose, baggy pants that looked like they would fall off at any moment. As soon as she had left Bonbon Palace, the girl had lit a cigarette there in the middle of the street. She didn't seem to have any blisters and thereby no anxieties.

'Every human being spends life searching for her own image,' wise men said, 'To become one with her and to find herself in her.' But even if that were the case, just as the Tuba tree in heaven had turned upside down with its roots up in the air and branches under the soil, so did certain mirrors turn what was sought upside down. In the girl who had left Sidar's house, Zelish Firenaturedsons had seen the opposite of her image. If only she could, she would entirely do away with herself and be converted into her.

'What the h.e.l.l are you doing on the floor?'

Zelish Firenaturedsons bolted to her feet and frowned at her brother who had dashed into her room without bothering to knock on the door first. Zekeriya had come to dinner that night with his wife and child. In slow, heavy steps Zelish left the room in silence. She found everyone seated around the table in the living room having their soup while watching the news. At one end of the table stood three pieces of the coffee cake the old widow at number ten had sent them.

As Zelish perched on the chair at the corner, the TV screen caught her eyes. A sixteen year old mother who had left her three-days-old baby in the dumpster of a supermarket was trying to hide her face from the cameras. The luckless baby had slept in the barrel among the litter quietly all day long and only when it started to wail at night had it been noticed and saved by pa.s.sers-by. The policemen who took her to the station and fed her had named the baby-from-the-garbage 'Kader'.

All of a sudden Kader appeared on the screen, her tiny face flushing crimson. She kept crying and crying, turning a deeper and deeper colour with each cry. Zelish Firenaturedsons broke out in a sweat. The baby was so red. Though she tried to release her glance from the pressure of that nasty colour, it was too late. As baby Kader was being pa.s.sed around from the lap of one policeman to another, all darkened and the darkness was a vivid red.

Zelish Firenaturedsons had fainted.

Flat Number 7: Me.

Awakened with the squeal of the alarm clock at 5:45 a.m., the idea I had relished so much last night now seemed pure nonsense. I would have hit the pillow and gone back to sleep if only I could. Instead I got up and looked out the window. It was still dark outside. That was when I felt like trying my plan out. At least it would provide me with something to laugh about with Ethel the c.u.n.t. Taking the bag I had prepared at night, I slipped ghost-like down the stairs. The apartment building was dead silent. As soon as I opened the building door, the cool morning breeze hit my face and then the subtle garbage smell. It had started already. Who knows, maybe my plan will have some use. If I succeeded in convincing even one person not to dump their garbage here, I would have considered myself as having served not only the residents of Bonbon Palace but the entire city.

In all its forlornness, for the first time since I had moved here the street I lived on looked gorgeous to me. Two st.u.r.dy street dogs sprung from the corner. They advanced zigzagging from one sidewalk to the other, got in front of each other; slowed down upon reaching the garden wall, sniffed at the garbage reluctantly and failing to come across anything worthy, trudged away. As I looked after them, for a fleeting moment I felt someone's eyes on me. Yet when I turned around Bonbon Palace was in utter darkness with the exception of Flat Number 9. A shadow rapidly pa.s.sed by the living room windows of the top floor. The lights of all the rooms in the direction the shadow moved were lit and then for whatever reason were turned off in the same order. I felt awkward. As I cased my surroundings, the silliness of what I was about to do upset me. Still, something in me refused to give up. My plan is pure nonsense but perhaps it is better that it be so. At times the only way of stopping ongoing nonsense is not to fight it back with rational rules or despotic prohibitions but to launch back some thing just as nonsensical.

As I got on the sidewalk and faced the garden wall, a grim pair of eyes accosted me. I had seen this cat before. It stares at humans with such pure hatred. Disturbed by my presence, it got up and walked to the end of wall with klutzy steps from where it continued to watch me. Taking the paint can out of the bag, I opened the lid with difficulty. When buying the paint the day before, I had asked the salesclerk for 'Muslim green' to match the occasion but what emerged from under the lid now was downright pistachio green certainly not an apt colour for otherworldliness. What's more, another nuisance struck me once I faced the wall with the brush in my hand. I sure knew what sort of a message I wanted to write but hadn't given much consideration to how to phrase it most effectively. A bread van pa.s.sed behind me noisily, continuing on its route after leaving a crateful of bread in front of the grocer opposite. Realizing what little time I had left before the whole city woke up, I hurried to write the simplest expression that came to my mind, going over every letter twice. As I worked conscientiously, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d cat watched my every move, swinging the tar black tail it had dangled off the wall.

When finished, I stepped back and examined my handiwork. It was not bad. Though the pistachio green was far too vivid and I had apparently failed to centre the writing, it still was all right. Large and legible enough to be perceived from even the middle of the street. I winked at the cat, collected the paint and the brush and returned to Bonbon Palace.

Just as I was about to enter, someone was getting ready to go out.

The aged lady at Number 10 was the last person I expected to see at this G.o.dforsaken hour of the morning, but it was as if she too felt at least as uneasy about this encounter as I did. While I tried to hide the contents of the bag in my hand, the ones in hers caught my eye. She was carrying four large bags that seemed empty. Her bags as light as a feather, she as light as a feather... I held the door open for her. Crowning that quizzical smile of hers with a polite, 'Thank you', she embraced her tiny frame and slithered away.

As soon as I entered the house, I went out on the balcony. Though I had intended to perch there to see with my own eyes the effect of my writing, the sleep I had left incomplete came and captured me like a clingy creditor.

Flat Number 9: Hygiene Tijen and the c.o.c.kroach.

After checking one by one the kitchen, living room, corridor and the back room, Hygiene Tijen finally turned off the lights and lay down on the bed exhausted. In the dead-calm of the darkness, sliced by the gradually dawning day, she turned and gazed with curiosity at the body next to her as if she saw it for the first time. She indeed gazed, but what she saw there was less a body than numerous infinitesimal bits and pieces. Her infatuation for cleaning, having long progressed to a chronic level had after a certain phase affected her eyesight like some insidious disease. Her eyes now subtly sliced-up everything she regarded, dividing the whole into pieces, the pieces into details and the details into bits. When she looked at the rug in the living room for instance, she perceived not the rug but its designs and the stains sheltered in those designs and the specks of dirt hanging onto those stains. While her eyes had become sharp enough to see indistinguishable details and hunt down the parasites invisible to the eye, she conversely had lost the ability to grasp anything in its totality. As such when she turned around in the bed and stared at the body next to her, she did not see her husband but the two drops of dried saliva by the corner of his mouth, the sand that had acc.u.mulated in his eyes, the food sediments on his teeth, the nicotine yellowing on his fingertips and the dandruff at the roots of his hair. In a flash she turned her face away so as not to have to see this any more but was too late. The disgust had already set in.

Disgust is no ordinary feeling, distributed lavishly to all living creatures on earth. To begin with, it is exceedingly particular to humans. Women are disgusted more often than men, and among women, some more so than others. Whenever Hygiene Tijen was disgusted, the sides of her mouth turned down, her legs got stuck stock-still and her whole body first got a subtle tickling sensation and was then covered with an intensifying itch. She curled into the foetal position, scratching herself non-stop while the feeling of disgust p.r.i.c.kled her toes, spreading from there to the upper parts of her body in wave after wave.

So far, she had become disgusted an infinite number of times for all sorts of reasons, but this time she felt a tingling not only on the tips of her toes but also on her temples. The tingling increased in a couple of seconds to cover her entire head; it then ran down her neck, squeezing left and right as if pa.s.sing through a bridge and as soon as it left the bridge behind, started to descend in splintered, orderly strips. Behind this swiftly mobilized army was none other than Hygiene Tijen's brain. Predicting well ahead the possible perilous consequences of Hygiene Tijen's sudden disgust for her husband, her brain had acted on its own.

For sometimes our brain grasps before us the likely results of the action we are about to take and, if it deems necessary, sets about taking precautions of its own accord. Hygiene Tijen's brain too had independently decided to take over the way things were going as it could envision that this disgust did not resemble the preceding bouts and that, when she started to be disgusted with the man she had once married, risking a confrontation with her own parents, the issue could transform into an interrogation of an entire life. During the following couple of minutes, Hygiene Tijen experienced a peculiar, terrible cramping in her stomach. For it was exactly at this region that the rebels fighting in the name of 'Disgust-for-husband' and the forces of 'Devotion-to-husband' confronted each other. It was the latter that emerged triumphant. The brain had successfully put down yet another mutiny. Now relieved from her stomach ache Hygiene Tijen breathed a sigh and headed to the bathroom dragging her feet. She turned on the light. The surrounding area was snow white. She poured a few drops of bleach on a paper towel and thoroughly wiped the toilet seat. As she peed she scrutinized everything around. There was nothing within an eye range that could pierce through the absolute dominance of white, her favourite colour.

There was an aura of a certain colour surrounding each and every person, according to a brochure she had once seen the brochure of an organization established in California where the members called each other not with their names but colours, held hands to form colour scales like impressive watercolour sets, but ultimately had to disband when the members started to separate into factions based on their hues. Perhaps the reverse was also true. Perhaps, 'There is an aura of a certain type of person surrounding every colour', and if that indeed is the case, the aura of people surrounding the colour white will no doubt be comprised of housewives. White confers pride and dignity to housewives. To Hygiene Tijen it only conferred comfort.

After flushing the toilet, she dripped a few drops of bleach on a paper towel and wiped the seat. Having thus embarked upon the task, she also cleaned up the toilet cover, under it and around it; then the toilet paper and towel hooks, the sink, the tub, and unable to stop herself, pulled up the washing machine to mop behind it. Just before she got out, she turned around half-weary half-content to take a look at the whole bathroom one last time. She closed the door behind her, but stood still. For the brain does not always go in the front but occasionally comes from the rear like this. Hygiene Tijen's brain too had decided with a lag of few seconds that it had seen something black, pitch black, wandering somewhere within the whiteness covering the entire bathroom. She reopened the door; she was not mistaken. A black and disgusting antenna was rapidly making way on the white tiles. Her heart in her mouth, Hygiene Tijen drew closer with cautious side-steps and only when really close could she distinguish that the thing she had been looking at in its details, but had failed to see in its entirety, was not a black and disgusting antenna, but a black and disgusting c.o.c.kroach.

Before she let out a scream, the black, repulsive owner of the black repulsive antenna had already vanished into a hole on the bathroom wall.

Flat Number 1: Musa, Meryem and Muhammet.

Because of the squabble inside, Musa woke up earlier than usual this morning. As soon as he entered the living room he spotted Muhammet there, squeezed between an armchair and the wall. Pretending not to notice the plea for help flickering in his son's eyes, he sat down at the breakfast table. Grudgingly shovelling into his mouth a lump of cheese, he reached for the teapot only to let go of it even more grudgingly. Alas, the tea had gone cold again. Though he pointed the teapot out to his wife, Meryem, too busy pushing the armchair with one leg while stuffing parsley twigs into half a loaf of bread, paid no attention to him. Sullenly bowing to the fact that he had to take care of himself, Musa's sluggish gaze scanned the surroundings and, pa.s.sing at a tangent to his son's despondent stare, inspected one by one the armchairs, coffee tables and chairs weightily lined up. Having thus drawn a complete circle in the living room, he finally focused on his wife once again. Meryem's belly seemed even bigger this morning.

Gobbling half the cheese on the plate, three slices of bread and all the olives left in the bowl as fast as he could, Musa left the house without a word. At this hour of the day, as the only place he could think of going was the grocery store opposite, that is where he headed. The grocer who was notorious for sitting hunched-up on the same stool and in the same spot, all the time spying on the pa.s.sers-by hadn't arrived yet. Like many a grocery store in Istanbul, in this case too, what made the store different from others was less the qualities of the groceries sold than the traits of the grocer. So profoundly had this identification of shop-with-owner been internalized by the hunched-up grocer himself that for a long time he found it impossible to accept the simple fact that his store could open in his absence. Nevertheless, ultimately facing the risk of losing customers if he kept on closing the shutters every time he went to the mosque to pray, he had been forced to entrust the store to his freckled apprentice.

The apprentice happened to be his brother's son, but since the hunchbacked grocer was a firm believer in the need to keep kinship and trade apart just like water and oil, he treated the youngster not like his nephew but as an apprentice ought to be treated. As for the boy, on no account could he work out how on earth this uncle of his, who bombarded him with callous orders and icy scoldings six days a week could then on the seventh day, on a Sunday family visit, turn into an utterly different person, bringing him chocolates he would not even let him get near to in the store. On such Sundays, whenever his uncle asked as if they had just run into each other for the first time in weeks, as if it wasn't him who had sworn at the boy only that morning in the store in front of everyone 'Tell me, my nephew, what do you do in your spare time after school?', at those thwarting moments how desperately the boy wished to vanish from the face of the earth. The acrimony of the past Feast of Sacrifice was still seared fresh in his memory. On that day, all their relatives gathered together, sacrificed a bulky ram early in the morning, then spent the entire day gulping down tea, almond paste, roasted meat, yogurt soup, wheat boiled with meat, yogurt drink, rice and meat sausage, apricot compote, meat pilaf, tea again, baklava with pistachios, semolina dessert for the spirits of the dead, grapes, watermelon, again baklava with pistachios and coffee; only to end up suffering from severe indigestion at night. The next morning, when the boy had arrived at the grocery store later than usual and still drained of colour, his uncle had yelled at him, crowning his reprimand with a sermon on an apprentice's responsibility to go to bed early and rise early. Unable to match in his mind's eye the jittery grocer at the store and the fatherly uncle he ran into on family occasions, the freckled apprentice had in the fullness of time started to perceive them as two distinct persons. This apparent solution, however, caused a few problems of its own: each time his parents asked him to deliver a message to his uncle at the store something inside the boy seemed to short-circuit, for he always forgot to do so.

When Musa approached the store, the freckled apprentice had placed the Book of Qu'ranic Verses on the counter, and with one eye on the door and one hand in the peanuts case, kept wolfing nuts while memorizing sections of the Qur'an.

Not at all used to getting up this early, and apparently disappointed to see the apprentice instead of the grocer, Musa thought, why not distribute the bread of the apartment building himself this morning? The moment he took a step toward the gla.s.s cupboard where the breads were lined-up, however, he stopped, highly perplexed. In a daze and almost frozen to the spot, what he looked at from that angle was the garden wall of Bonbon Palace, which he soon pointed out to the freckled apprentice. The two of them stood side by side, studying the pistachio green writing there.

'I hope Meryem won't ever see this,' Musa exclaimed. Then, as if sharing a joke with himself, he chuckled, displaying his rotten teeth.

'Why so?' the freckled apprentice grimaced, having just missed the nut he had flung in the air.

'Why so? Why do you think? Simply because she'd accept it as true!'

Flat Number 10: Madam Auntie.

Having emptied every single one of the bags she had brought in, Madam Auntie opened the double doors and stepped onto the balcony. The roofs of the apartment buildings across were dotted with hordes of seagulls, all staring in the same direction, all similarly sullen, as if compressed under the weight of the same cryptic contemplation. Her eyes fixated on them, Madam Auntie distractedly caressed the pendants on her two necklaces, one of which she never took off. On the long chain there hung a key, and on the short one, the austere face of Saint Seraphim.

Istanbul, she thought, resembled a woman heavy with child a woman who during the last months of pregnancy had put on far more weight than she could carry. With every step, the swish of water rose in waves from that belly of hers, long swollen with grandeur. Though she constantly devoured whatever she could get hold of, she was no longer able to tell how much of what she ate benefited her or the crowds of teensy, touchy and voracious beings growing within her body day by day. How desperately she would like to, if only she could, get rid of this excruciating burden. Instead all she could do was to simply swell up throughout the centuries. The comestibles which she consumed in one gulp were transported to her by ships and boats, cars and trailers, shaky-legged porters and caravans, their tails long lost on the way. Had she, with this insatiable appet.i.te of hers, not been able to spurt anything out, Istanbul would have long before blown up, taking the life of both herself and those dwelling in her. Auspiciously she could always spew things out. She purified her worn-out body, just like a person would use expectorants to oust putrid gases, bodily fluids and vomit in order to live and keep living. Istanbul poured the pus oozing from her festering wounds into hills of garbage. That she could still persevere, she owed to the garbage mounting in piles upon piles even when buried deep in holes, emerging from its ashes even if burned shovel by shovel, never to wane even when carried far away. It was thanks to the glorious garbage that Istanbul could still carry on.

As such the garbage dump was not an end. Life did not terminate there but merely changed form and essence. The items thrown in the trash, as if churned out from the invisible walls surrounding the city, were then dissolved into their components, sorted out, burned up, pressed, buried yet they never wholly perished. Like a fugitive on the run, the garbage ultimately sneaked back to Istanbul through the soil, water or at times air. With the help of the garbage-gatherers, the lodos or the seagulls.

The seagulls seemed to be of the same opinion as Madame Auntie. These theoretically carnivorous, originally directionless birds had in time become so accustomed to feeding on Istanbul's trash that they had fully integrated into this everlasting gastral circle incessantly begetting waste from life and life from waste.

Every night and every morning, Madam Auntie sat on her balcony looking far and down on the russet hill where the shanty houses with cursorily painted facades had been heaped to the brim while she listened, as attentive as a silence-worshipping seagull, to the hum of the city flocked together by the gale only to be scattered by it once again. In this final stage of her life, if she were offered a chance to be born again wherever she pleased and as a different species, Madam Auntie would no doubt choose to be born here in Istanbul, only this time, disguised as a seagull.

Flat Number 7: Me.

It was almost noon when I woke up. Thrusting into my briefcase today's lecture notes, as well as yet another Kierkegaard for Ece, who apparently preferred to borrow them from me rather than purchase her own, I rushed out. While I was leaving my flat, the neighbour at Number 8 was going into hers. In a hurry, as always. She seemed to have done something to her hair. It was better before but she still looked fetching, indeed very fetching. She greeted me warily with a nod, averting her eyes. Yet I caught that glance in her eyes. She is not as timid as she seems to be. Neither is she that indifferent to the world around her. Down on the ground floor, the door of Flat Number 4 was ajar. That nasty woman was standing at the threshold, asking Meryem to do her ch.o.r.es. Upon seeing me, her lips twisted into a galling smile.

'Professor, did you hear what happened to our apartment building?' she blurted out. 'It turns out there was a holy saint in our garden!'

I had completely forgotten about it.

'I am not at all surprised,' I said, not losing my cool. 'It is a well-known fact that there are countless graves left from the Ottomans, as well as the Byzantines, at various corners of Istanbul,' I added without taking my eyes off my watch. 'Are we to claim that all the dead in this city lie within the existing cemeteries? Of course not!' There must be still thousands of undiscovered graves. What could be more natural than the fact that some of these graves belong to people regarded by the populace as holy saints?

Zeren Firenaturedsons inspected me from top to toe, trying to grasp whether I was making fun of her or not. When she pouts, the creases on her forehead make her look even more edgy. 'Academics!' she heaved a sigh, and as if with this single word the whole conversation had turned to her advantage, she crossed her arms on her chest, remaining silent. So did I.

Zeren Firenaturedsons' th.o.r.n.y stare stirred toward Meryem, standing next to us, listening to our conversation with a look of anguish and tightly closed lips as if worried she might let slip a word she'd rather not. For a fleeting moment it seemed to me that upon hearing my response a gleeful glint glimmered in the depth of her eyes, but the very next second, hurrying to get rid of us both, she grabbed her list of ch.o.r.es and scurried out ahead of me.

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

'But grandpa, what if I step on them by mistake?' exclaimed the five and a half year old.

'If you step on them, the genies will get into you. They will twist you out of shape,' roared the seven and a half year old.