Latife Tekin - Berji Kristin - Tales from the Garbage Hills

Two years later she returned to Flower Hill accompanied by an old man and she bore her aged friend from hut to hut like a workbag, introducing him as ‘Amem Şemsi’s husband’. Before long a flock of Amem Şemsi’s relations, friends and acquaintances swarmed over the place and as the number of people asking for Crazy Gönül’s hut increased, the squatters left off calling behind them ‘Are you a teacher?’ The hut people thought that the well-dressed strangers lost in the streets must be teachers, but when they realized the true state of affairs they made their disapproval very clear. Crazy Gönül began to get angry at their sour looks. ‘If you think you’re any better than me you can fill my belly!’ she said. The Flower Hill men pulled knives on three clients who came knocking on her door and when she opened up she was given the official title of ‘The First Whore of Flower Hill’. ‘I’ve got to live!’ she said as she took in the strangers amidst shouting and fighting. Amem Şemsi’s husband could not bear the fights any longer and stopped dragging along beside Crazy Gönül. He gave up the ghost and died. And when Crazy Gönül’s support had passed on, then Flower Hill acknowledged her as their first whore who could be bought for a bagful of grapes and a lump of cheese. Some of the men kept a credit account with her, and she got into fights with those who did not pay. She attacked their wives and stoned the squatters’ windows, weeping with rage. Her eyes clouded with fury, and it was only at the cinema that they shone like glass. When her distress became too great she thrust her bare feet into her nylon slippers and ran to the cinema.

Slipper bird, slipper bird

Flap flap slipper bird

Flower Hill’s appetite swelled high to the skies above the garbage hills as this slipper bird flew amongst the huts. Every day that passed the number of women racing to the cinema increased. They shed many a tear on the roads until they discovered that the film stars had not really died, but once the tears were dried the young girls started to go about with bare arms and legs like film stars and the women cast off their headscarves. Fired with the desire for pleasure after Tirintaz Fidan’s night lessons, women now clung to their husbands’ hands and feet begging for love. They trembled and swooned with upturned eyes and uttered strangled sobs at not being loved, but their men who were gambling their lives away in the coffeehouses brought them back down to earth with a beating.

Hacı Hasan, the muezzin in one of the mosques of the tin minarets, was shocked by the Flower Hill women’s immodest dress and while he strolled quietly in the mosque courtyard, thinking, ‘Lord, what will become of these women!’ his own daughter, famous on Flower Hill for having read the Koran twenty-seven times from cover to cover, was stricken with an incurable illness. She was unable to appear in public or even at her window. No matter how many prayers Hacı Hasan recited over his daughter, she did not recover and the malady carried her off to the next world. The squatters duly wept together and took her up and buried her in the graveyard. Before a month was out the girl had risen from the grave and returned to her father’s hut, weeping bitterly and with arms and legs severely burned. ‘It’s God’s punishment!’ said the muezzin and sat his daughter down on the divan, her head covered by a fine white muslin with hand-embroidered edges. He put up a cotton curtain to separate the divan from the room, and he hid his daughter behind the curtain. He went round every single mosque on Flower Hill, whispering to the imams that his daughter had risen and come back from the other world. Even before he got home Flower Hill was on its feet; it was not clear who had spread the news.

Behind her curtain the muezzin’s daughter softly read a verse from the Koran to the people crowding the hut. Then she revealed that God had brought her back to this world as a lesson to the women who walked with bare legs and arms and their hair uncovered. She hid her face in white muslin and showed her burned arms through the folds of the curtain to the women huddled together in fear.

When the news reached other areas of the garbage hills, the ground before the muezzin’s hut became like the place of gathering on the Day of Judgement. At midnight the squatters waiting their turn to speak to the muezzin’s daughter were sent away at her request, buzzing in alarm and hanging on to each other’s skirts and arms. When the crowd had withdrawn, the muezzin peeled off the beeswax blackened with soot which had covered her arms and legs, and the exhausted girl collapsed on the divan and fell asleep. In the morning the muezzin called his daughter at the hour of prayer, smeared her legs and arms again with beeswax and renewed the soot. After he had blackened her limbs he prepared his hut for visitors. The girl rehearsed under her breath new warnings learned from her father and sat down on the divan. And before a single morsel could pass her lips people were leaving their huts and gathering at her door.

Some time later inhabitants of the city’s other shanty-towns began to stream to Flower Hill. The muezzin’s hut became a convalescent home where people came and went in search of a remedy for their troubles. Hacı the Muezzin began to pray and breathe over barren women and to produce charms and amulets for broken hearts. Although he would accept no money from those who spoke with his daughter, he did not refuse sugar, tea and rice. When there was no more room in his hut he came to an agreement with a grocer for the sackfuls of sugar, tea and rice. One day a week he closed his hut to visitors and went off to sell. Within three days his sacks were filled again to the brim by squatter women who had covered up their legs and arms or wrapped themselves in black cloaks and were asking for news from the other world. And while the sacks were filling up the muezzin’s daughter waxed lyrical. She described the trees, the water melons and sweet melons, the houses and rivers of the other world. She imitated the screams of people plunged from boiling water into icy cold for going to the cinema in this world and forsaking prayer and fasting. Behind the curtain she uttered little moans. The hoarse strangled sound was overheard by the police and one afternoon they raided the hut. The muezzin was tied up and sent to prison. The girl stripped the beeswax from her arms and legs and ran off to find a husband.

The Flower Hill women underwent a crisis of belief after this, and their faces showed traces of deep confusion. They plastered make-up on their cheeks and lips and around their eyes to hide the traces and when they reappeared, beaten black and blue as never before, the multi-coloured clouds of the Flower Hill Industries burst open from envy.

Şini Erol, the president of Flower Hill Sports Club, raced about the huts whipping up the young workmen in the repair shops to dream of becoming football stars. The shining hero of the Flower Hill football team was Hidir who pursued this dream so fervently that he beat up his mother day and night for money so that he could eat his daily ration of half a kilo of hazel nuts which Şini Erol had recommended instead of milk and eggs. Hidir’s brothers in the dream chose the same method of extracting money and one by one the women of Flower Hill were subjected to the ‘Hazelnut Ordeal’.

Şini Erol sold glass, mirrors and birds in Factory Foot Quarter and devoted his life to the young gypsies and squatters for the love of football. Before a match he shut up the flower of the team in his shop, got to work on their backs and gave them all a thorough massage. The match over, he gathered the team and took them to the hamam where he carefully kneaded their backs, fronts and legs. The hamam outing was followed by orders of new bread for everybody, hot from the oven and spread with two packets of margarine for each player, all part of the diet. Every time they scored Şini Erol kissed the lobes of their ears and when one of the young men fell out with his father, Erol put up a bed in his shop and stayed the night with him.