Latife Tekin - Berji Kristin - Tales from the Garbage Hills

While there was no end to Poet Teacher’s poems about the garbage hills and the hut people, sham factories began to be built on Flower Hill. Poet Teacher, pencil in hand, stood and looked at the men running up factories on the garbage slopes. Strange feelings disturbed him, and his head reeled with a confusion of words. Under his lashes his eyes heavy and helpless flickered over the old factories surrounding the huts and the apartment blocks far far away. Then he took a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote on it, ‘The garbage hills were washed in fake detergent’. He laughed at his line, then folded the paper and put it back in his pocket, wondering how to solve the mystery of the garbage hills and capture it in his poem.

As Poet Teacher clutched his pen tight, some of the scavenger women and girls went to work in the sham factories with the men. From morning to night, in these factories which had been set up in just a few days, they produced fake detergents, multi-coloured fruit powders and juices, mouth-scorching chocolates, liquid whiteners that would not bleach and soaps that would not lather. The girls poured liquids into bottles and powders into packets and the men burned their hands as they worked at the plastic presses. The artificial fruit powders and mouth-scorching chocolates spread from Flower Hill to other neighbourhoods. In all the huts the washing was done with detergents that would not foam, and in all the huts the children cried for the blue and black fruit powders.

The hut people entertained visitors with these powders and stored up packet after packet for their most important guests. The powders turned into the juice of unknown fruits. The sham factories went on spreading, reaching from the huts right down to the Rivermouth Neighbourhood. And in time the site was given the name of ‘Flower Hill Industries’. Small textile workshops opened on the site, and from them blue, green and red smoke blew into the sky. Clouds of all shapes and colours lay over Flower Hill. Factory snow fell on the huts and the clouds descended as coloured rain. The factory snow melted in the coloured rains and all the names inscribed in deep black letters on the Flower Hill huts were washed away. Time passed and these sham hut-sized factories determined Flower Hill’s destiny until other hut-factories were conjured up to circumvent the strikes. Flower Hill Industries produced new songs and customs for the hut people, but although a period of plenty arrived, their wounds did not heal. Flower Hill became a single hut with the sky as ceiling and factories as walls. Noise drowned noise.

Flower Hill Industries drew the squatters away from the garbage hills which were then abandoned to Poet Teacher and the gulls. Poet Teacher wrote a long poem comparing the scavenger birds to his pupils. One evening when his heart was heavy and he wanted to read his poem to the birds he muttered it with downcast head and dragging footsteps. But the birds fluttered their wings indifferently at Poet Teacher; for them there was only one poem possible about the garbage hills. The hut people had written it long ago. It was not very long. It was quite brief and consisted of one line recited through screams, shouts and stone throwing.

‘Away with garbage!’

When garbage ceased to be a source of profit, rumours spread that the garbage flies would consume the squatters who would then breathe fire and flame at Garbage Owner and disown the garbage mounds. This, ‘Away with garbage’, which summed up the lives and experience of the squatters on the garbage hills, would be seen as the signal for action. The protest would be sparked off first by the gulls beating their wings and waking the sleeping babies, then flying skywards as they played the game of turning day into night. The birds would be stoned.

As a result of this state of affairs on the garbage hills, Poet Teacher’s poem to the birds remained unfinished. A screech-fight broke out between the gulls and the squatters. Bruised and sore, the birds dropped their feathers over the garbage trucks and flew off into the clouds. Poet Teacher, bird feathers on his shoulders, gazed into the dark clouds which the squatters called, ‘Bird cloud’ and withdrew from the garbage mounds. After the birds the truck drivers who transported garbage to the slopes were attacked under the screeching clouds.

It was common knowledge how long this protest would last. Whenever the truck drivers came to unload garbage the squatters would drag them from their vehicles, beat them up and put them to flight before they could empty their trucks. Every time a new settlement sprang up they played this game of tit-for-tat.

But this time the game was joined by Garbage Owner, the garbage watchmen and the hut women who tore the fronts of their dresses and lay down before the trucks. As the quarrel and debate dragged on over which particular hilltop they would inundate with the truck drivers’ blood, the gypsies’ takeover of the garbage hills disrupted the usual course of their protest.

Although there was already a communal gypsy settlement among the hut quarters on the garbage hills, the Flower Hill people, busy with the garbage protest, assumed that the gypsies were merely migrants drawing breath as they passed through Flower Hill. But when the squatters had finished talking with them they knew that the gypsies had fallen in love with the magical coloured clouds rising to the heavens and would set up their own home on the garbage mounds along with a troupe of bears. Moreover, the gypsies would heal the wounds of the garbage gulls and search the garbage along with them for cardboard boxes to build houses to live in. Realizing this the squatters lost the urge to spill the truck drivers’ blood on the garbage hills and took a break from protesting. A discussion arose as to the origins of the gypsies and so Honking Alhas, expert in gypsy lore, was rescued from oblivion among the huts.

Honking Alhas’ livelihood resulted from his skill in erecting huts within the hour for inhabitants of other hilltops of the city. At the beginning of discussions he stood out for his wide knowledge of the gypsies who occupied the top of the garbage mounds, and of many more races as well. He declared the gypsies were people without a homeland or religion and, moreover, they were barbarians and on their identity cards was written ‘Romany’. He said ‘Romany’ meant a person of uncertain origin. He gave the hut people a further piece of knowledge — that the gypsies were descended from a mountain very far away, half hidden in the sky, its height unknown, and they had dispersed all over the world hundreds of years ago. The names of the countries they had gone to were all recorded in Honking Alhas’ mind. Quick as lightning he flashed out these names which the hut people were hearing for the first time and were quite unable to get their tongues round.

This flood of names which poured out in his honking pronunciation caused by a nasal obstruction, was inscribed in history, but the number of people in the world, let alone on the garbage hills, who knew these names now could be counted on one hand. To be able to imagine what it was like when the Romanies first settled in these parts, the squatters had to know about a certain ‘Ottoman Empire’. So Honking Alhas left aside the Romanies for a while, feeling he had to tell the squatters that where they now lived there had once been an empire of this name. The squatters wanted detailed and accurate information on the gypsies, but he filled their ears with accounts of sultans, imperial edicts, cities with streets inlaid with wood, and golden doorknockers. And when he had confounded them with all that history had written about the Ottoman Empire, he returned once more to the subject of the gypsies and pinpointed their most important characteristic. He said the gypsies were filthy and he blessed the sultan for issuing an edict to throw them out of the city whose inlaid streets they had defiled. He sighed as he told how, after the edict, the Romanies fled to the springs and reservoirs which supplied the city. They had passed into history as people who had polluted the water of this beautiful city where they lived. From his knowledge of history he affirmed that they would pollute Flower Hill and reduce it to an uninhabitable state. When he had described how the sultan chased them from the reservoirs and drove them out of the city and declared war on them, Alhas put his history back on the shelf. Gypsy women were very fat while the men were very slight, he said, and asked the hut people if they knew why this was so. They watched his mouth expectantly and laughed loud and long. Honking Alhas, nose in the air, answered his own question. He said the men swallowed pills which dissolved bones and shrivelled flesh and that they passed day and night in sleep and dreams. Every day their womenfolk plucked three hens each and ate them; this was why the gypsy women and girls were called ‘Gacos’ or ‘birds’.