Latife Tekin - Berji Kristin - Tales from the Garbage Hills

The wingbeats of the gulls tore the smoke from the Flower Hill Industries to rags; dispersing slowly, it mingled with the dappled sky. The gleam of the garbage hills died away. In the cardboard houses the gypsies left off playing and singing, and while a rumour swept through the huts like a gust of wind that the workers’ unions would be closed down, mother-of-pearl buttons opened over Flower Hill. The stars shone. Bejewelled with huts, the world’s face darkened, and night fell. Those who complained they had had enough of the workers and their pigeons, tents and unions went to bed early and slept. But others who were shocked and bewildered by the workers’ march assembled in the huts.

From his knowledge of the world and human nature, Honking Alhas was the first to maintain that communism had come to the garbage mounds and that the community’s unity and harmony would be destroyed. From now on, he declared, they would have no sleep. He reminded them of the days when Garbage Owner had sent large tins of halva to the fridge workers’ strike tents and claimed that the workers would never again taste halva from Garbage Owner. The word ‘halva’ became a joke to the simit-sellers on Rubbish Road and the silent seagulls on the cardboard houses. Bayram of the Pine (the only one on Flower Hill to have a pointed pine tree before his hut) said that what had come to Flower Hill was not communism but workers from the bicycle and cable factory with star and crescent flags. He repeated what the workers from the seacoast had shouted when they met and mingled with the men from the garbage hills. Waving his hands about, he declared that most of them were guffawing as they marched and had no idea of what would happen. Mikail the simit-seller, well known among the workers on Rubbish Road for his mimicry of all kinds of animal cries and best of all for birdsong, backed up Bayram of the Pine. He described how the women in their white headgear streamed from the chemical factories like a foaming torrent, and swore it was a lie that the workers had beaten up the men unwilling to come out. He said they had marched in an orderly way, but when they saw the women thrown down and beaten they had flared up in anger. ‘The women were treated very badly’, he said, and he called his two eyes to witness, beady as a bird’s. He said most of the women were screaming and shrieking from broken arms and backs. Never again would they be able to lie on their sides, he grieved, then opened his mouth and gave vent to screams like the screams of the women being dragged along the ground.

The hut people condemned the men who had encouraged the women to go into the street and get beaten up. They argued fiercely about male honour being represented by women, and they all agreed that at the next flare-up the men should not stand back and let the women go into the front line.

While angry shouts were being exchanged on this subject in the workers’ settlement, Simit-seller Mikail began to do an impersonation of a worker on Flower Hill hit by a stone at the base of his neck. He clutched his neck and crashed to the ground at the hut people’s feet. Their eyes were wide with excitement and as he looked at them, he yelled, ‘Save me!’ Then he got up and suddenly turned into a policeman. While he was running off he got caught among the wires over the road. Hands raised, he mimicked the policeman gasping with terror, and the hut people couldn’t help laughing at his antics. He dropped his hands to his sides and said that if a general (which he pronounced ‘gerenal’) stopped a worker on the march and asked him where he was going, the worker would be nonplussed. Comparing the workers to quarrelsome colts, he swore they had no idea where they were going. What he said about the generals showed his real feelings. He summed it up in a simple phrase

Suppose the generals had met

The men on Asphalt Road

This final phrase of Simit-seller Mikail, who had looked on the torrent of workers with his eyes full of poetry, was the gem among the myriad words uttered on Flower Hill after the march. And whoever heard it laughed till they cried. While he was selling his simits and mimicking the birdsong on Rubbish Road, tears rolled down people’s cheeks. As he watched he imagined his name shining high above Flower Hill. But he wasn’t chosen from the hut people to become a star, for one morning before daybreak a fire broke out and burned the cardboard houses to ashes. The gem lay buried beneath.

One of the garbage tales, known as ‘The Great Garbage Fire’ was about Chief Mahmut, the head of the gypsies, and Crazy Dursun the squatter and the five gypsies who died by fire. It ran on and on in couplets that were rooted in the speech of the squatters who lived on the garbage hills.

From the rooftop Crazy Dursun had a view

Of the gurgling kettle as it poured its brew.

‘The gurgling kettle’ was the name the Flower Hill folk gave to Chief Mahmut’s samovar which stood in the gypsy chief’s cardboard residence. It was a magnificent creation, with its slender tubes dovetailed together and the big shining teapot with its strainer. Chief Mahmut would sit cross-legged by this samovar that gleamed like a mirror, while he crowned the hut people’s rotten teeth. Everyone who entered the chief’s cardboard house came out equipped with teeth gleaming like tinned copper and delighted with the gypsy tales dropping from Mahmut’s lips. Chief Mahmut was not only expert at crowning teeth but also at filling the gaps with teeth as good as real. He re-silvered mirrors and re-tinned pots and pans. He had seven wives and twenty-one children. But the apple of his eye was his youngest wife Zülika whom he was said to have kidnapped. She was a Posha gypsy. Squatters who entered Chief Mahmut’s cardboard abode were dazzled by Zülika and she became famous on Flower Hill. Her sparkling teeth bright as the full moon, her crescent eyebrows and long wavy hair that swung at her heels in a knot created the ‘Posha legend’ and the belief that the beauty of the Posha gypsies was fatal.

While Zülika was the sole subject of conversation devoured by the hut people, Crazy Dursun of Flower Hill left his mother’s hut and settled by the gurgling kettle at Chief Mahmut’s knee. He never stuck his head outside the house of cardboard. Crazy Dursun’s migration from Flower Hill to the cardboard houses gave rise to a string of jokes. Then these subsided and rumours grew that Ziilika had been seen going down Panty Way at the dead of night having fun with Crazy Dursun in the breezeblock yards. These rumours reached Chief Mahmut’s ears while he was silvering a mirror by his gurgling kettle. But he just looked in the mirror and laughed, showing his gleaming teeth, his own handiwork.

Three years before he moved to the cardboard houses Crazy Dursun used to polish shoes on Rubbish Road. One midday as he was dozing off by his shoe box, his shaved head burned in the sun’s rays and he got sunstroke. His brain seethed. The brush he held rolled out of his hand and he too fell to the ground. He began to thrash about; banging his head to right and left, he collapsed exhausted and fell asleep in the arms of two watchmen from the factory. For three years he never rose from his bed but lay breathing deeply, subjected to all kinds of attempts to cure him by the Flower Hill people. The illness, which befell him in his fourteenth year, eventually cleared up in his seventeenth but left him in a dazed condition. His chin which had slipped over to his left ear righted itself but his wandering wits never came back to their nest and kept rocking like a cradle inside his head. On account of the tumult in his head his eyebrows were set in a moody frown and he wore a peevish angry expression. During the day he would take his peevishness through the Flower Hill streets; at night he was inconsolable. He undid his shirt buttons in a fit of distress and punched himself repeatedly until he was panting and groaning, and when the Flower Hill people had gone to bed he rushed outside, then beat on their doors with all his strength. ‘Hey, get up! I’m in a bad way!’ he shouted and cursed the sleepers. If anyone opened the door he slipped in and sat in the best seat, breathing hard with anger. But the community had had enough of Crazy Dursun’s night time visitations. In the alleys of Flower Hill his whole body would be seized with convulsions, and when the fit was over he would lie down motionless on the road to sleep off his exhaustion.