The Flea Palace Read Online Free PDF

the speech he was to deliver days in advance. Yet that morning, having finally mustered the courage to propose marriage to the daughter of his maternal aunt with whom he had been in love for years, he had been so badly rejected that he took to the streets wandering aimlessly, thus failing to get both himself and his speech to the ceremony on time.
    Upon arriving at the site of the ceremony with a delay of almost an hour, the Third of the Three Consultant Buddies could not find anyone around. Only scattered cigarette stubs and tangled footprints remained of that boisterous crowd. He sat down by the tomb in grief and, wiping his sweaty forehead, started to read the text that had consumed so much of his timealoud to himself. There was actually no need for the paper since he knew every single line by heart. In a voice that quivered at first but got stronger eventually, he declared how the person lying in the tomb was a most distinguished saint who had kept his appetite for worldly pleasures captive in the turquoise-covered ring on his finger. He declared also that the saint had, in accordance with his convictions, refused to sleep under the same roof for more than one night or eat from the same bowl more than once; used a brick for a pillow in perpetual pain; never gotten married to leave behind any descendants, or any property or goods; wandered all year round deeming the earth his house and the skies his roof; in short, the name Saint ‘Hewhopackedupandleft’ had been bestowed upon him for spending his whole life with no roots nowhere. Hence it would not at all be contrary to tradition to move the tomb from one place to another and whomever argued otherwise should be mistrusted not only as to their intentions but also the depth of their religious knowledge. At the conclusion of his speech, turning pensive he distractedly caressed the words ‘
baqiya hawas
’ on the inscriptions of the stone sarcophagus. Then, as if responding to a distant call, he sprung up and hurried in the direction he had come from.
    It wasn’t until this point that the graveyard of Saint ‘Hewhopackedupandleft’ achieved the unspoiled calm and composure it had yearned for so long. Leaving aside the visitors occasionally praying by his grave who rubbed their bus, train, ferry or plane tickets on his tombstone, not a single event would occur for about thirty-six years to upset its turbulence-free peace. Probably because of the ad infinitum movement of the saint’s tomb from one location to another, it became a custom among travellers setting on a long journey to stop by this place a day before their departure to seek his blessing and to thumbprint a corner of their tickets, as if getting the approval of an imaginary customs officer, with the rust-coloured soil of the tomb. After the second half of the 1960s, these travellers were gradually replaced by ‘guest-workers’off to Germany and their relatives. During those years, the most faithful visitors of the saint were the women left behind by the guest-workers going abroad. Since in their case there were no tickets to be had, they ended up rubbing the rust-coloured soil on their fingertips or palms, which resembled henna when dry. In time, most of these women went to join their husbands so the number of visitors gradually diminished. At the end of thirty-six years, first the wood railing, then the crimson-veined white marble and finally the rust-coloured soil of this imposing tomb were secretly swallowed-up by the stores, workshops and restaurants engulfing it in the ever-shrinking circle of a chase or hunt. Thus the tombs of Saint ‘Hewhopackedupandleft’ that once numbered two and then reduced to one, finally reached nil.
    As for the hilly land of the two old cemeteries, it was there that the fastest transformation occurred upon the completion of the avenue. Along the slope on the northwest side of the orthodox Armenian cemetery sprung up graceful apartment buildings, tailed by, like kites with