Latife Tekin - Berji Kristin - Tales from the Garbage Hills

Hairless Ali, don’t you cry!

We’ll have a laugh at your expense

Without a bit of fun we’d die.

So up you go and have a turn,

Cold iron might improve your burn.

Mr. Izak’s factory was put together in the same makeshift way as the squatters’ huts. Hundreds of guesses were made about Mr. Izak’s origins, where he was born and grew up, and where he had come from to the garbage hills, but not a trace of his roots was discovered. In the settlement Mr. Izak put down his name as belonging to no homeland; he was as humble as the streams that ran between the hills. He wore workers’ overalls and poured sweat like the other workers. He applied all his strength to one thing only — his machinery. Those who saw him thought he had been delivered on the garbage dump.

When darkness settled pitchblack over the factory he went home; and in the mornings, before any of his thirty-seven workers, he climbed the garbage hills and opened the factory gate again. He worked until he ran out of breath. Very soon, as he installed machinery, tools and workers, and also made certain changes to the building to go along with the machinery inside, his factory no longer bore any resemblance to the huts. He had the top half of the windows painted grey so the workers could not look up from their work at the dazzling slopes of the rubbish mounds. He had an iron door attached to one side of his factory. The traces of tears on Bald Ali’s face wrung his heart, and he quietly slipped into his pocket a present of a spare key to the iron door, advising him to hurry up in the mornings and open the door before the rest of the workers got there. After that he had a guard placed at the door and made him search the workers as they left. Every evening he took on ten more men who did not mind being searched.

As production improved, Mr. Izak relaxed his discipline at work. One day he would arrive before all the workers and another day later than Bald Ali. One of his late days he did not put on his overalls and when the workers were eating at midday break Master Gülbey the ironworker said, ‘Izak has become the gaffer.’ The men guffawed as they ate. Mr. Izak slipped amongst them and asked news of their sick wives and home towns. He took out his wallet and gave them pocket money for their children. From then on the overalls were discarded: only his speech was like the workers’. He said he shared his fate with the settlers and that he too would spend his life with his eyes burning from the refrigerator chemicals on the slopes of the garbage dump. He called them all ‘Garbage Brothers’.

In the huts the hammering and plastering never let up. No sooner was one wall repaired than another collapsed, and then a roof leaked, and one day bits of tin would be nailed to hut walls and on another bits of wood were put up to cover the gaps. A particular saying grew up in the squatters’ language — ‘The hut fences walk when the moon rises but near the graveyard they stand still’. Thus they described the character of their huts held together with pieces of wire and wood.

Mr. Izak’s factory was only too pleased to be so unlike the huts. Work was never-ending, and there was always building, banging and hammering going on. Like the hut boundaries which walked at night, the garden wall moved as the huts tumbled down but, unlike the huts, never stopped as it got near the graveyard. When Mr. Izak approached the graveyard he recited a short prayer, then went underground. As the fumes filled the huts from the refrigerator chemicals, he had narrow tunnels dug under the slopes opposite the garbage hills. Big and little cells were opened up and new underground sections of his factory were installed beside the dead. Rumours soon spread through the huts, which shook from the rumbling below, that Mr. Izak would waken the dead and set them to work and would suffocate the living with refrigerator chemicals and lay them in the graves of the dead. He inspired fear and anger by embellishing the garbage mounds with bones and hollow skulls for the hut children to play with. The belief grew that this would bring bad luck to the huts.

To clear his name of this superstition Mr. Izak sent word to the foremost hut people and held meeting after meeting with them in his factory. He declared he would distribute milk to those suffocating from the chemicals. He poured milk down their throats by the gallon; then he built them a mosque next to his factory. Their growing anger vanished like the foam on the milk he distributed, a litre a day, for the following year. But as Mr. Izak’s reputation grew velvet and creamy, his iron fist began to show. Under the mosque he built a storage vault for the refrigerators, and tunnels to connect it to the factory. He opened up more new underground rooms and installed new workers in them. Besides refrigerators he started to turn out washing-machines, radios and cookers. To distinguish the workrooms from the graves he had fluorescent lighting fitted in the ceilings, and the following names were inscribed on the doors:

METALWORKS

GLAZING

PLASTICS

WELDING

POLISHING

LATHE WORKSHOP

ASSEMBLY SYSTEMS

PAINTWORKS

In time Bald Ali’s spare key grew tarnished and rusty and he kept it as a memento of Mr. Izak. Working underground with the others he melted away, dried up and choked. He coined an expression and passed it round all the workers — ‘We took over the garbage hills but were moonstruck and forgot what was underneath’. While the workers were laughing together and inventing sayings full of references to Mr. Izak’s underground factory, Ali mimicked his voice at midday break and nightshirt, and made speeches starting — ‘Brother Workers!’. After every speech he pulled the key from his pocket and pretended to open the doors. The workers guffawed and shouted — ‘Sign us a leave-of-absence chit, Bald Ali!’, and he signed cigarette papers. In a voice pitched high against the roar of the machinery he told them stories of the days when Mr. Izak had worked alongside them. Half the stories were mangled in the press and half were stifled on the conveyor belt. As Ali forgot some of the stories from tiredness and began to sing and dance halfway through others, the workers on the assembly lines never took him seriously.

At the factory doors

Four workers stood.

Over the garbage hills

Sleet fell in showers

In the days of the young thugs whose gunfire had startled the snow-white seagulls into a flight covering the sky with a black cloud, big tough guys had swaggered about Rubbish Road. The workers knew them as the Bully Boys. Workers who talked about unions, or insurance, or compensation, were beaten up until the blood flowed, and their yells mingled with the roar of the machines.

Smoke went on pouring from the chimneys and in time the workers in the factories strung along Rubbish Road joined a union, and the Bully Boys became a legend. Now the machine roar mingled with shouts from the factory owners sitting down at their tables to collective bargaining.

‘Child allowance? And what’s that?’

‘They’ll come to the factory at festival time.’

‘They’ll kiss our hands.’

‘We’ll give them pocket-money.’

When the men of Rubbish Road made a move to enroll in the union, Mr. Izak took on a new factory manager. They heard that Mr. Izak’s new man had come from another country far away and that his first job would be to have hostels built on two of the garbage hills for the factory employees. His name resounded through Rubbish Road like the great seas which surrounded the country he came from and where he had been educated.

The manager put his training into practice in the refrigerator factory. He summoned the workers and first congratulated them for being clever enough to use their neck cloths (issued to polish the refrigerators) for wiping away their sweat and making a mouth mask; then he announced that from now on they could not have the bonus they had had once a year. Instead he would give out biscuits and yoghurt on alternate days.