The Flea Palace by Shafak Elif

Author:Shafak, Elif [Shafak, Elif]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141048956
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-10-24T13:00:00+00:00

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 God 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 buttons 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 passed 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 petite, but his frame had shrunk visibly since he had started elementary school and thereafter to butt 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

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