Latife Tekin - Berji Kristin - Tales from the Garbage Hills

From the first day of Flower Hill, Kurd Cemal’s name turned up in thousands of different stories. There was no one who did not know how he would keep his finger on the trigger and fire Bang! Bang! and how he would dress up in winter in a felt coat and in spring would carry a flowering branch. He appeared for the first time knocking at Garbage Chief’s door and Garbage Chief humbled himself and stood up to meet him. But while Kurd Cemal and his henchmen were deep in conversation with Garbage Chief, the people of Flower Hill suddenly rose in a body and poured into the street. When they heard that Kurd Cemal was to become a member of the Town Council they came running up, and the unemployed formed into a long line. The women with their water cans made a circle round Garbage Chief’s red-tiled hut and forced Kurd Cemal to stop beside the water tankers. To rouse his sympathy they pretended to pick a quarrel and tore at each other’s hair and faces. Kurd Cemal applauded them as they made this show of beating each other up. He announced his wish that Flower Hill be given shining new water taps as soon as possible. He promised the men who stood in his way asking for work in the factories that he would find them jobs when he joined the Town Council. Then he and his men marched along Panty Way and, as they disappeared from sight, Garbage Chief’s front door, garden and hut interior filled with people. But Garbage Chief was silent, his lips sealed with a mouthful of concrete, and not a word of his conversation with Kurd Cemal leaked out. All the same, Kurd Cemal’s comings and goings on Flower Hill turned into a rumour that he would open a cinema in the middle of the garbage hills.

But Kurd Cemal was on the point of opening up a brand new squatters’ quarter, not in the middle of the garbage hills but where they ended. Finding a way round bureaucracy, he promised Garbage Chief money and land for a single hut and asked him to spread the news in the factories and workshops of Rubbish Road that the forest land beyond the garbage hills was being turned into heath, but to say not a word to the Flower Hill folk. While Flower Hill was approving velvet curtains and black leather armchairs for Kurd Cemal’s cinema, Garbage Chief was going the rounds of the factories and workshops of Rubbish Road. ‘Anyone who wants can become a hut owner here’, he said, whispering Kurd Cemal’s name in the ear of the workers who wanted to own a hut. Then he sold building plots in Kurd Cemal’s name.

One night the workers left the factory and scattered to the forest land behind the garbage hills; they dug up the heath and levelled the earth. Then they set up random huts from breezeblocks. Four days later they were completely surrounded by menacing trucks and behind the garbage hills, that ‘film’ ran for days in Kurd Cemal’s ‘cinema’.

Welcome huts

Good riddance trucks

While the glittering screen of the garbage hills showed the smiling faces of weary workers, the cement dust stopping up Garbage Chief’s mouth blew away through the streets of Flower Hill, and they heard how he had taken money from the workers. The people laughed for days at their own innocence and henceforth all such swindles were known as ‘Kurd Cemal’s Cinema’, a name which spread to other neighbourhoods and factories. Tricks were played so thick and fast it became a byword and soon the name ‘garbage hill’ was forgotten among the hut people and replaced by ‘Kurd Cemal’s Cinema’. In that cinema, days merged with darkness, darkness with the moon, the moon with the stars.

Spring passed into summer.

Şerme, Şerme! Wakey wakey!

Rust-stained face

And sweatcloth ready.

Şerme, Şerme! Wakey wakey!

When the foreman of the nightshirt appeared in the corridor of the refrigerator factory, the workers used to shout a warning, ‘Şerme! Şerme!’ so no one would be caught napping. They would throw bits of tin at any sleeping worker and make a noise to wake him up.

For Bald Ali these noises in the assembly line which could make a sleeper miss a heartbeat and jolt him awake to the conveyor belt were no more than a blanket. So he never woke up to the yells of ‘Şerme! Şerme!’ When the foreman shook him by the shoulders, he stretched out his feet against the wall and buried his head among the sacks. He thrust his bent elbow at the foreman, who took his card number to file a report. Then, after making a silent tour of the assembly line, the foreman stood by one of the workers who was hanging components on the conveyor and checked his speed by his watch. When he saw drops of sweat dripping on the conveyor belt from the cloths round the workers’ necks, he pursed his lips, afraid he might be tempted to say ‘take it easy’, and hurried out. After he had gone, swearing and laughter broke out along the sliding conveyor belt. One of the workers picked up a longish wire, tied a rag on one end and dipped it in turpentine. It was a tail for Bald Ali, which he lit with a match, hooked on, then slipped away. Ali caught fire and fell on the floor, his clothes smouldering. ‘Fuck you all!’ he shouted aflame. Breathless, he tore off his shirt and trousers and stood stark naked. He bit his hand in fury and as he explored his hurts he began to cry.

Hairless Ali, don’t you cry;

We’ll sling you on the old conveyor

And treat your burns with dry hot air.

The workers on the assembly line used to sing the ‘Bald Ali’ song as they placed components on the conveyor belt and it was such a lively tune that the ‘evap’ on the conveyor belt would dance as it was pushed along from one worker to the next. While Ali melted away in the heat that flamed in his face from the mouth of the furnace, the rest of the workers on the assembly line would roll his wiry body into a ball. As the nightshirt foreman caught him napping every four or five nights, they used to call him ‘Sleeping Queen, Song of the Assembly Line’ and handle his head, his arms and legs, touching him up suggestively. Sometimes Ali would shrug and stay quiet, but sometimes he would snatch up a hammer and start chasing one of the workers, yelling ‘Hey, hey!’ ‘There goes our Hey, hey Ali’ they would laugh. Ali would spit curses at his tormentors, but the heat of the furnace and the noise of the sliding belt would stifle them.

The first huts to go up on the garbage hills were also the first to sing about Bald Ali before he became the subject of the workers’ song. He used to sell well-water in tin cans on a donkey with blue beads and red tassles hanging round its neck. When they heard his voice far off, the women would snatch up their clashing tin buckets and come running, their headscarves streaming behind them. As they ran, Ali would start crying, ‘The water of Harip won’t swell the belly, the water of Harip won’t burn your inside!’ Then as he grew hoarse from shouting, the women would bang their tin buckets together and begin singing ‘Harip gives water as good as our well!’ Then Ali would lean back, swaying his shoulders until they touched the donkey’s rump. He would kick out his feet in a dance and wind the red tassles round the blue beads. Having finished his water-selling dance, he would disappear shouting from among the huts. When he was out of sight he talked to the donkey.

As Ali talked to the donkey, one by one the blue beads fell on the roads between the huts, and the red tassles blew away in the wind. It was the installation of the first water-pipes in the huts that drove the donkey away from the garbage hills. Ali gave up selling water and began to mind the pigs at night on the lower slopes of the garbage hills. A week later, his wife Veliman sat herself at the window, leaning her face on her hand. The brightness of a full moon gleamed on her face. One of the watchmen came and blew his whistle. ‘Why not just once?’ he whispered. Veliman cursed and swore at him for many nights but finally she grew weary of staying up for Ali and stopped swearing. ‘All right’, she said, ‘for a price’. She struck a bargain with the watchman and led him to her bed. The watchman told others, and while Ali minded the pigs in the farmyard all the watchmen in the area left teeth marks on Veliman’s neck. She soon made a reputation as ‘watchmen’s Veliman’. She beat up three women from the huts who spoke and giggled behind her back, then went into her hut in a fury. She bared her neck at the window for the wind to blow dry the beads of sweat and as she sat looking up at the sky to get her breath back, the wife of one of the watchmen came pounding at her door. Veliman snatched up the bread knife and slashed the woman’s mouth and tore out her hair. In the end she left Bald Ali and disappeared. Then Ali gave up minding the pigs and started lamenting on the garbage hills. He shed as many tears as the canfuls of water he had once sold on those roads. While he went about crying, Mr. Izak set up a makeshift factory on the slopes across the garbage hills and the hut people heard that workers were being taken on at the refrigerator factory. Ali broke off his lament for Veliman and joined the refrigerator workers.