Latife Tekin - Berji Kristin - Tales from the Garbage Hills

Banging and drumming,

Breasts bouncing ahead.

The hut people on the march for water raced behind Fidan like an avalanche of rocks until they reached the breeze-block yard and brick factory. The red-faced brick workers gazed at them through the lattice screens, and their whistles and catcalls mingled with the banging tins. Fidan fled from the whistles like a deer going down to drink. When she saw the workers waving she stopped and laughed and wriggled her shoulders. Coyly, she planted her hands on her hips. Obscene comments mingled with the whistles, but Fidan turned her back and slapped her rump. Those who thought the brick makers were jeering at their ulcers and deformities cursed their red faces and hooded heads and a fight broke out between the hut people and the brick makers on account of water. Many were soon curled up on the ground with wounded heads: screams rent the air: children cried and women yelled. Beginning to feel guilty, Fidan stood among the women fluttering her shoulders like a partridge, puffing and panting, until she lost her patience and threw herself in among the men, tin in hand, and catching one of the brick makers, hurled him to the ground and jumped on him. He grabbed her by the shoulders which had provoked the whistling, pulled up her skirt and stared at her flowery underpants. Fidan shook him off and got up, swearing. Foaming at the mouth she kicked him hard. He collapsed by the bricks, holding his head, and turned his dust-filled eyes up to the sky. ‘Whore!’ he shouted. Fidan turned white as a sheet at the insult, peeled off her underpants and tied them on his head.

For days the brick makers passed round Fidan’s flowery underpants and composed verses to them. They were tied to a post in front of the screens and, in the name of water, they streamed and waved like a flag. From that day on, the long wide road from Flower Hill to the town hall took the name ‘Panty Way’ to commemorate Fidan’s flowery underwear.

For the sake of water Fidan had donated her underwear to the road and her bouncing breasts to folk-song. But the water wagons waited for the end of the strike before going up Panty Way to climb Flower Hill. A day before the wagons arrived the white tent was dismantled and brought to the electric bulb factory with dancing and clapping. The chemical factory went back to work, and the machine with the forty hutfuls of coloured powders started up with a rumble. Once more the snow that made people faint and ill fell on Flower Hill, and blue water streamed from the warm fountain.

The blue water flowed and sparkled in front of the wagons that carried the drinking water to Flower Hill, and Fidan went from hut to hut, plucking eyebrows and cutting fringes. She told the women that lovemaking was the best way to shed sin and find relief from worry, and she stirred up mischief by suggesting that men were not the only ones to enjoy pleasure, a woman also could have pleasure from sleeping with her husband. Along with the wind and the garbage, her reputation and her night lessons left their mark on Flower Hill. Songs for her mingled with songs about wind and garbage and her night lessons were heard in other neighbourhoods, in the factories and workshops of Rubbish Road. Her coquettish ways of leading a man on with seductive looks and provocative gestures were the talk of the factory workshops and dressing-rooms. When she fluttered her shoulders like a partridge she filled the young men’s sleep and dreams, but for every new thing the women learned from her they took a beating from their husbands. Her shoulders that invaded dreams and her wits that brought beatings on the women distracted the wind as it carried off the sounds of Flower Hill. Once seduced, the wind rushed from the factories down to Panty Way and sweeping off the flowery pants the brick makers had tied to a pole, tossed them up in the air and blew about crazily beneath the clouds, adding the heavy roar of the factories to the softly-falling snow. The snow stopped the stink of the garbage heaps and whitened the Flower Hill homes. At night the wind swooped over the white huts and reached the roof of Garbage Grocer’s home as it stood like a bird with outspread wings.

Panting and groaning, Garbage Grocer cast eyes on his wife so passionately that the roaring wind stopped in its tracks and the snow softened and melted. He pointed to his sweating flesh and said he was on fire. ‘Turn round, girl’ he said, and begged her to relieve him. He promised a thousand things if only she would dry up his sweat and put out his raging fire; he would bring her fragrant soaps wrapped in shiny paper and creams in screwtop jars with mirrors. But Garbage Grocer’s wife did not give herself for soap and cream; she refused to go to her husband and defending herself with Fidan’s lessons, she cried, ‘Have you no fear of God, you pimp!’ She cursed loud and long and poured out a stream of complaints. She stood screaming in protest that for years he’d treated her like a lump of wood and she’d never had the slightest taste of pleasure. When Garbage Grocer began to insist that pleasure was a man’s prerogative she set up a lament: her constant cramps and back-aches and the frequent loss of colour which turned her face white as plaster all came about because there was no sexual satisfaction in her life. With tears streaming down her face she gave him a list of all the women who had experienced pleasure in intercourse, had stopped having headaches and had even got rid of their kidney stones. She sulked and hung her head, then lay down on the divan curled up like a ball. The Grocer’s blood boiled with rage and he sang over and over one of the songs composed for Fidan. He wiped his sweat away fanning the feverish fire in his breast. The flames leapt and crackled and spread outwards, burning up whatever they touched but not dying down. The Grocer could no longer withstand his lust and sidling up to his wife, ordered her shamelessly, ‘Come on, girl, turn round!’ His wife swore she would not play the sheep and as he groaned and moaned she pouted and shrugged and stubbornly declared, ‘I won’t’. The Grocer lost his head, grabbed her by the hair and told her to clear off back to her father’s. At first she stood without budging in the middle of the hut. But when she saw the scorching fire flaming out of his eyes ready to consume her, she squatted down like a bird with drooping wings and agreed to turn round. The Grocer took his pleasure. He had cooled his sweat and damped the fire, but his wife’s defiance sticking in his throat, he perched on the divan and ordered her to sing the song, ‘I won’t come, I won’t go,’ and to walk up and down the hut a hundred times. He swore he would beat her till the roof came down if she missed a single turn, and his right hand signalled her to begin. She pleaded plaintively, but he remained unmoved. There was nothing for it but to begin, and she raised her voice in song and walked back and forth in tears, while the Grocer watched her. The wind laughed to see the Grocer’s wife bobbing to and fro in the hut. Laughing, it blew above the huts and could not help dancing to her lively singing until dawn came to the white streets of Flower Hill. That morning it spread the news of the Grocer’s wife who had asked for pleasure from intercourse but was made to sing instead.

Garbage Grocer’s aspiring heart rose higher than the stars in the night sky. Soon after he came to Flower Hill he had a roof built on his hut; it looked like a bird with open wings and he decorated it with tiles. While everyone talked of the colour of the tiles and their grooved shape, he ripped out his door and in its place put a huge door with an embossed lion’s head on it. He took to bragging endlessly about his lion door. Some were annoyed by his bragging and began to enquire secretly where Garbage Grocer had bought it. After lengthy research Nylon Mustafa (nicknamed ‘Thankless’ when the Flower Hill community was first founded as he did not know how to thank God) discovered the secret of where Garbage Grocer got his door. He immediately bought a lion door, stuck it on his own hut and threw the old one in front of Garbage Grocer’s to annoy him. This act of Nylon Mustafa’s was so approved of by the Flower Hill folk that there was no room to sit in his hut that evening. From the next day on everyone on Flower Hill took to replacing their doors, and soon several door merchants appeared with trucks on Flower Hill. Into the trucks they had piled the brass-knockered, lion-headed outer doors from the old city mansions and big stone buildings which were being pulled down here and there, along with stained-glass inner doors or frosted-glass bathroom doors, and brought them all to Flower Hill. Everyone fancied an embossed door and a stained-glass door. The hut doors were dismantled and Flower Hill took on a historical air. The streets gloried in pomp and splendour, and the huts had surprising number sequences, like 92/1, 117.