Latife Tekin - Berji Kristin - Tales from the Garbage Hills

The workers named the factories after their effects; some made the lungs collapse, some shrivelled the eye, some caused deafness, some made a woman barren. Their proverb for marriage between equals was ‘A bride with dust in her lungs to the brave lad with lead in his blood’. The saying gained ground when one after another the young car battery workers married girls from the linen factory. Young men who had worked in the car battery factories for two or three years could contract lead-poisoning and become impotent and the only match they could find on Rubbish Road was with the pale wan linen workers.

This practice on Rubbish Road became as well known among the hut people as the sad story of a factory owner who adopted a child who turned out to be deaf and dumb. The story fascinated the hut people far more than Kara Hasan’s impressions of fainting workers, or the drawings from his imagination. And when they looked at Rubbish Road they narrowed their eyes and stopped their ears and grieved for days for the factory owner who was so kind to a stranger’s dumb child.

However, the clouds of grief over Flower Hill were dispersed by yellow leaflets in ant-like print which were left quietly one night at the hut doors. All night long they were blown about the streets by the whirling wind; they flew over roofs and stuck in the branches of trees and against windows. Playfully they curled and twisted like little kites in the wind as it drove them downstream. Just before daybreak the whine of the wind changed to a scream throughout Flower Hill.

Flower Hill Folk!

Awake, awake!

Three black shadows have I spied,

One stood ten paces in the rear,

One whistled clear,

And one into the gardens stole

To scatter leaflets everywhere.

I blew them far and wide.

The wind’s voice mingled with the wails of children, and one by one heads peered from the huts. Together they bent curiously over the leaflets caught in the branches and stuck under their doors.

Flower Hill Folk!

Support the strike!

At first the yellow leaflets confused people. They speculated on the three black shadows. Some said the strikers had distributed the leaflets; some thought one of the shadows could be Kara Hasan. Others could not understand why the workers would leave such leaflets and still others wondered why they could not actually speak up instead of writing and why they had left the leaflets in the dead of night. Meanwhile the contents of the leaflets were on everyone’s lips and changed from person to person. The yellow leaflets grew bigger and bigger and Flower Hill was drowned in waves of anger. Everyone began to ask who the three black shadows were, where they came from and what business they had distributing leaflets and advice. The men got together and advanced menacingly on the picket lines with the leaflets in their hands. Güllü Baba’s hut overflowed. Kara Hasan swore he had never touched a yellow leaflet in his life and that he had been asleep when the three black shadows sneaked into the gardens of the huts. He offered as proof the dream he had had that night about dancing with the animal skins. No one owned up to the three black shadows, and the men who had gone so threateningly to the picket lines came back.

While Flower Hill and the strikers drew apart in a hostile silence the white tent turned as yellow as the leaflets on the doorsteps. The banners hung up at the picket lines on the first day of the strike, ‘We want festival presents for our children,’ and ‘Are we workers or slaves?’ faded and became illegible. The banners drooped and collapsed and with them Flower Hill’s demands disintegrated. Only a few snatches of song from Kara Hasan’s moving tunes still rang in the people’s ears. The clatter of backgammon reached Flower Hill from the picket line. Women sat around with their knitting and lacework, bored and depressed, and strikers lay down in the white tent and fell asleep. Talk veered towards the silent factory behind the white tent. The workers who had looked with joy at the lifeless factory buildings in the first days of the strike were now saddened and they yearned for the roar of the machines while their hands missed the feel of the shiny tinkling glass vessels. They kept imagining the movement of conveyor belts.

The leaves of the strike year have faded away,

O my heart’s full of sorrow!

While the strikers were waiting to get back to work Güllü Baba’s water predictions came true. As the girls on strike sat writing heartbreaking poems in their scrap books adorned with filmstars, a strange epidemic from the drinking water spread over Flower Hill. Red beak-like sores appeared on every face, big and little, and soon the sores had covered the whole body. The numbers dropped of those who came from Rubbish Road to the tin minaret mosque on Flower Hill, and the gap widened between the strikers and the hut people. Kara Hasan fixed his gaze on the distant strikers’ tent and listened to ballads borne on the wind, while his sores were eating him away. And as the girls went on inscribing their verses under the eyes of the scrapbook filmstars, the ulcers began to suppurate. The babies of the community stopped growing, and the children curled up at the foot of the divans, holding their heads. The men turned to scarecrows, with running sores on their deformed necks and heads, and when they walked their heads drooped sideways. The birds fled from Flower Hill; the chickens refused food from the women; the trees shed their leaves. The fallen leaves covered up the songs and dreams which grew out of the strike, and a crust formed over the talk that spread from Rubbish Road to the huts.

The people of Flower Hill had nothing left to talk about, so Güllü Baba laid aside his oracles and thought up wise things to say about the importance of water to human life: he urged the Flower Hill men to find water, as man’s wits depended on it. The men were wearing down the factory doors in their demand for water when Mother Kibriye, who knew every part of the body, vied with Güllü Baba’s wisdom, saying, ‘Only God can survive without water.’ Telling them that the liver and kidneys swim in water and that a human being’s organs would shrivel without water, she instilled fear in their hearts. She announced that shedding tears was fatal, warned the women to stop their children urinating and then told the story of how she had fallen victim to the water’s anger, losing her husband in a foaming torrent. With renewed grief she withdrew to her hut.

Combined with Güllü Baba’s insistence that a man’s wits required unpolluted water, her warnings shook the whole community. The panic-stricken people took up buckets and began to wait by far-off water pumps. But the owners chained up the pumps and put them under lock and key.

When this unpolluted water was padlocked, Fidan of Many Skills who gave the women of the community ‘Evening Classes’ in the arts of the bed, opened her rosebud mouth. She cursed the men’s deformed necks and the women’s long fluttering lashes which shaded their cheeks. Her curses ran on and she flounced fiercely out of her hut. The sores in her eyes and ears were so bad she didn’t know what she was saying or doing. She asked the men how they would enjoy sex without water. She picked up stones and hurled them at the huts and shouted that they wouldn’t be able to take their wives to bed. Her voice was hoarse from shouting. Seizing a tin she struck it hard again and again and, gathering around her all the people in the community, she led them down the hill, until the earth and sky throbbed with the din.

Fidan of Many Skills goes to the water

Jumping and skipping,