The Flea Palace by Elif Shafak Read Free Book Online Page A

she served, the more she felt God became indebted to her. She would sooner or later receive what was her due. ‘This is a test,’ she assured herself with a smile. ‘The more arduous it is, the more exalted the outcome will be.’
    ‘Why is there that grin on your face! How dare you laugh at our faces?’
    Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova looked in surprise at the Muslim woman yelling at her but her bewilderment only made the latter even more furious. The woman was a member of the Contemporary Women’s Association which advocatedthe deportation of all White Russian women; whom they believed were ripping out Muslim men’s reason from their minds and money from their pockets. Prioritized among the agenda items of the association were the following:
To determine and record one by one incidents of immoral behavior performed by White Russians with soft and silky blond hair, fair complexion, shameless looks and aristocratic pretensions
To wear out the gates of the upper echelons of state administration in order to gather support for their cause
To ensure the closing down of all the dens of thieves and nightclubs capable of drawing the wrath of Sodom and Gomorrah onto Istanbul
To ‘shoo’ away all the prostitutes who had descended from Kiev and Odessa to bed down on the quarters of Galata
To constantly and ceaselessly warn the innocent, inexperienced Muslim youth about the danger awaiting them
Until the authorities took the necessary precautions, to pursue by their own means a policy of intimidation by mistreating all White Russian women they encountered.
    Overcoming her initial confusion, Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova reached her neck and squeezed the silver pendant bearing the picture of Saint Seraphim. The strength she thus drew enabled her to smile at the woman whom she regarded as a recent incarnation of the torment-filled ‘divine test’ she had for such a long time been going through. ‘What you just did was not right but I can still be tolerant and even forgive you. For that would be the right thing to do.’
    That night, only cursorily did she mention this event to her husband. He never asked her anything anyhow. Not only did he not want to learn a single thing about the world outside,but he also envied her for managing to survive in that insane world which had roughly shaken him up and tossed him aside. Rarely did he leave the dump they considered home ever since their departure from the dormitory provided by the French Red Cross, passing his days in front of the window as he penned never-to-be-posted letters to his brother in France, got lost in thoughts, looked outside at the Muslims passing by and watched the streets as if waiting for someone. Almost as if arriving to put an end to this monotonous wait, their baby was born in seven months.
    Yet Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova could not welcome her daughter with the same excitement as her husband. Her early and painstakingly onerous childbirth may have contributed another life to this world, but that life had been stolen from her. She had felt far more important and so very different during her pregnancy compared to how she felt now. She had convinced herself all along that God had chosen her from among many and had subsequently considered every calamity yet another crucial phase in the strenuous test that was being put to her. Never having lost her faith in God or herself, she had wholeheartedly believed herself to be the heroine of a cautionary tale of damnation the people around her could never understand. In order to save from the claws of this idle world both her husband and herself, she had struggled for them both but always on her own, awaiting, like a pearl rolled into mud, that day when she would be cleansed to shine once again. Yet now she started to imagine she had been mistaken all along, that God did not look after her but the baby in her womb and, for that reason, abandoned her to her fate as soon as the baby was born. However hard she tried, she could