Latife Tekin - Berji Kristin - Tales from the Garbage Hills

Dense darkness settled on Mr. Izak’s factory; for a moment he imagined that his factory would slowly melt and vanish in the darkness and by morning would have disappeared. ‘Save my factory’ he shouted. The sleet stopped falling. Inside, the men were in Master Gülbey’s hands; outside, the trucks were on the alert. Once again the deep darkness was split by a harsh voice summoning the men outside. Gülbey leant on the window and looked into the night torn to shreds by Mr. Izak. He inhaled and gulped a mouthful of cigarette smoke and darkness, then brought the workers together and sat at the conveyor belt. ‘We’ll melt all the plastic and make imitation grenades’, he said. His voice exploded in their ears and they were filled with terror from head to toe. Master Gülbey peered into his friends’ shadowy faces. ‘We’ll make a fool of them, mates!’ he said. He sent three men in place of the plastics workers who were keeping watch. The plastics workers melted down the material and made ten white balls, but the melted plastic stuck fast to the flesh of their hands and cold metal was pressed on the burns. ‘We’ll bounce a grenade on your heads’, they cried in reply to the yells from the darkness.

The balls changed the workers’ fear to hope: but neither fear nor hope lasted long in the sleety dawn down by the machines. The state of the workers suited the words Bald Ali had poured into their ears; those who had taken over the top of the garbage hills had once more forgotten what was underneath. They had thought it was as easy as taking a spoon out of yoghurt to sit by Mr. Izak’s machines and do no work. In the night the three men sent to keep watch slipped away. The workers were angry that they had deserted, handing over their duty to the wind howling over the factory. But their curses soon gave way to fear: ‘where will all this lead to?’

Taci Baba turned round and gave the huts a long long look. As if in reply darkness swiftly abandoned them and dawn appeared. Taci Baba’s face lit up with the glitter reflecting from the garbage mounds, and he turned to the workers. ‘We’ve not sized up this business properly,’ he said, and he revealed the idea which illumined his face. Taci Baba’s suggestion to gather the women and girls and get them to shout and yell in front of the factory caught on among the workers. Grey Hamit was elected to round them up from the huts and instructed to shout at the top of his voice by the garbage mounds, to lie down like a corpse and pretend to weep and wail if the women ignored him. He was sent off in haste and hope.

When Hamit took his grey head off to the garbage mounds the hut children were already up and spread along the mounds, and the hut people had gathered on their roofs. They echoed his shouts in unison. He wore a blue apron which he took off and waved like a flag to the huts, shrieking like an alarm bell — ‘Women and girls!’ ‘They’ll slaughter us! They’ll murder us!’ he yelled between the huts and threw himself about. He beat his grey head on the stones and peered mournfully at the women whose eyes were wide with curiosity. Grabbing their skirts with one hand and pointing to the factory with the other, he rounded up all the women, girls and children from the huts and followed the workers’ instructions to the letter. While his ears rang with the women’s shouts he moved into his act of weeping and wailing and, as he scooped up a handful of earth, simulated moans and cries burst from his throat. During the act the earth he had scooped up suddenly became a stone which stuck in his throat. Hamit turned his head painfully towards the women and swallowed, and as he looked at the flowery headscarves everywhere his eyes filled, he slowly drooped his grey head by the women’s feet and began to cry.

The tears pouring from Grey Hamit’s eyes became a torrent which swept the women to the factory door. As they were carried away crying and shouting, Hamit wiped his eyes on the blue flag he held. He stood up in triumph and asked for Granny Dursune’s hut: he had heard of her in the factories in the days of the hut wreckers. He began to run down the stream. Granny Dursune looked at Grey Hamit’s face smeared with earth and at his blue apron but she could not recognize the man diving breathlessly into her hut. ‘It must be one of us, but which one?’ she muttered. When she had listened to him she stuck a pistol into the waist band of her baggy trousers and marched from her hut.

Where Granny Dursune had sat herself down during the protest days, with the pistol in her baggy trousers, Mr. Izak later covered the spot with asphalt, drowning the screams from the women and girls of the hut community in tar, and opening the two main doors of his factory onto this square. The workers paced out the ground and found the spot where Granny Dursune had pulled the gun on Mr. Izak, and this became the meeting place of the fridge workers greeting each other at night-shift. When the workers were released from the underground machines and staggered to the surface, they raised their arms and breathed in deeply as they met the men on night-shift duty. With narrowed eyes and anxious hearts, the night-shift workers closely watched the men appearing from the doors which opened into darkness. ‘More power to your lungs!’ they murmured. They touched one another on the shoulder as they separated and the fresh air tore at the lungs of the emerging workers. Daylight pierced their pupils like a needle and their tired arms shielded eyes blinking with pain. The watchmen halted the men shading their eyes.

Have you taken, have you stolen

Mr. Izak’s wires and bolts?

That is banned.

Bring your arm down, show your hand.

Mr. Izak’s watchmen, recruited from the hut people, searched the workers while they were still dizzy and aching, but would find nothing but traces of work on their clothes, hands and armpits. Spots of white paint from the job had dropped like white feathers on the painters’ shoes while they were at work. They had stuck cloth caps on their heads so their hair would not turn white in a single day and had the idea of making sweatcloths out of the refrigerator polishing rags which they hung around their necks and held to their mouths as masks while they worked. At the start of the factory dinner break, workers in the deeper sections who had to pass through pitch-black corridors would wait for the painters to come out first so as not to miss the canteen door. The corridors would turn white from the drops scattered by the painters from their faces, hands and caps.

Painters, white doves.

The polishers would drop their sandpaper and straighten up holding their tired aching backs. Their eyes met a pitch darkness as black as the metal dust sticking to their faces, and they lost their way even in the white-painted corridors. Their black faces merged with the dark and disappeared. To get rid of the oily black they used to wash before coming up to the surface, then rushed from the hot water desperate to clear their stifled lungs and blow out the metal dust lodged in their throats as soon as they could. ‘The man in a hurry is streaked with black’, they said. A black streak as thick as an eyebrow would remain somewhere on their faces. They would go home shivering, their hair wet-combed and traces of work on their noses and foreheads.

Polishers with black-streaked foreheads.

The metal workers laughed the loudest at these marks left in haste. As they laughed they used to bang their files on the hammers and cup their hands round their mouths and the rust from their hands would smear their lips and faces.

Metalworker giants, big-mouthed with rust.

The giant workers were pale but fiery-eyed, and their hearts were wrought of iron. Their workshop was down in the depths of the factory. Iron filings and rust rained on their lashes and filled their eyes, their pupils dry as dust. Even as they jeered at the polishers a cold anger lingered in their eyes. While they worked their ears were deaf to each other so they threw away their hammers and shouted in unison. Their shouts travelled up to the surface of Rubbish Road, and the factory workers there believed these shouts would cast a magic spell. Whenever the garbage hills echoed with the metalworkers’ cries, all the fridge workers would come up to the surface and pitch a tent at the factory gate. They wrote all over the doors and windows and hung the tarry square with inscribed banners waving as the wind blew.