The Flea Palace Read Online Free PDF Page B

multi-hued ribbons, stores with glittery windows, sidewalks to promenade with flair, new locales throbbing with rhythm. When the value of the buildings skyrocketed, those who had a house or land in this area pocketed large amounts of money in no time. Many of the flats facing the avenue were rented out to businesses; mostly to doctors or lawyers. Such offices mushroomed so far and wide that before long there would be at least one doctor or one lawyer in any shared taxi operating in the neighbourhood. So much so, that in each of these shared taxis, one frequently encountered people with plenty of health complaints or legal problems but no money, only there for a free consultation with the doctor sitting next to them or the lawyer behind. Some of the minibus drivers themselves, thanks to their eavesdropping on such conversations from dusk till dawn, accumulated animpressive amount of knowledge on both medical and legal matters. If truth be told, one highly fashionable general neurologist, whose constant use of a particular route meant he became the best of friends with one of the most astute of the drivers, had actually got into the habit of referring some of the queries he received to this driver. Though the elderly mischievous doctor had originally proceeded with this game out of boredom, he eventually got great enjoyment from it. The young driver was one of the few with a mind sharp as a razor and a tolerance unique to bohemians. Besides, having little regard for the physician’s rules of etiquette or for weighing each word, he blurted what he thought right out, utterly oblivious to the hopes he might shatter in doing so. As he drove the shared taxi, he would mimic the obsessions of neurotic ladies and angst-ridden gentlemen, even managing to get them to laugh at themselves. His performance so impressed the elderly doctor that after a while he offered him a job. In spite of their good intentions, however, the witty friendship of the two could not survive the rigorous formalities of the office environment, and the young driver ultimately returned to his minibus.
    In no more than fifteen years, the appearance of the vicinity was entirely transformed. Not a single person remembered that there had once been, and still were, hundreds of graves under these grandiose offices, stylish stores and fancy apartments shining along the avenue with the perfection of porcelain teeth. Most of the flats had narrow, double-door, carpeted elevators. Had these elevators operated not only between the ground and upper floors but also further down into the ground, one would have seen, like slices cut from a colossal cake, all the segments of life’s inner workings. At the very bottom, there would be layer upon layer of the earth’s crust, then rough, knobby soil; upon that a stratum of decimated graves, followed by a very thin line of tarmac road, a couple of flats piled up on one another, a layer of red-brick roof and, on top of it all, a sky of endless cerulean plastered and diffused all over. Occasionally, some people were heard to mutter softly asif to themselves, ‘Once upon a time there were graves all over this place…’ Yet these words had a somewhat surreal sound to them though the time referred to dated no further than fifteen or twenty years ago. It was reminiscent of saying, ‘Once upon a time, girls more beautiful than fairies took baths of light in the thousand room crystal palace of the sultan of the moon.’ That is how real it sounded, a past that had never been experienced or an ethereal silver setting somewhere outside the mundane flow of time.
    Bonbon Palace, its garbage cans knocked over by Injustice Pureturk on Wednesday 1st May 2002 while parking his van, was built in 1966 in this neighbourhood which had by then little left of its former splendor. As for the husband and wife who built the apartment house, though they were foreigners here, they had been to Istanbul previously.

Even Before…
    WHEN AGRIPINA FYODOROVNA