Hairless Ali, don’t you cry;
We’ll sling you on the old conveyor
And treat your burns with dry hot air.
The workers on the assembly line used to sing the ‘Bald Ali’ song as they placed components on the conveyor belt and it was such a lively tune that the ‘evap’ on the conveyor belt would dance as it was pushed along from one worker to the next. While Ali melted away in the heat that flamed in his face from the mouth of the furnace, the rest of the workers on the assembly line would roll his wiry body into a ball. As the nightshirt foreman caught him napping every four or five nights, they used to call him ‘Sleeping Queen, Song of the Assembly Line’ and handle his head, his arms and legs, touching him up suggestively. Sometimes Ali would shrug and stay quiet, but sometimes he would snatch up a hammer and start chasing one of the workers, yelling ‘Hey, hey!’ ‘There goes our Hey, hey Ali’ they would laugh. Ali would spit curses at his tormentors, but the heat of the furnace and the noise of the sliding belt would stifle them.
The first huts to go up on the garbage hills were also the first to sing about Bald Ali before he became the subject of the workers’ song. He used to sell well-water in tin cans on a donkey with blue beads and red tassles hanging round its neck. When they heard his voice far off, the women would snatch up their clashing tin buckets and come running, their headscarves streaming behind them. As they ran, Ali would start crying, ‘The water of Harip won’t swell the belly, the water of Harip won’t burn your inside!’ Then as he grew hoarse from shouting, the women would bang their tin buckets together and begin singing ‘Harip gives water as good as our well!’ Then Ali would lean back, swaying his shoulders until they touched the donkey’s rump. He would kick out his feet in a dance and wind the red tassles round the blue beads. Having finished his water-selling dance, he would disappear shouting from among the huts. When he was out of sight he talked to the donkey.
As Ali talked to the donkey, one by one the blue beads fell on the roads between the huts, and the red tassles blew away in the wind. It was the installation of the first water-pipes in the huts that drove the donkey away from the garbage hills. Ali gave up selling water and began to mind the pigs at night on the lower slopes of the garbage hills. A week later, his wife Veliman sat herself at the window, leaning her face on her hand. The brightness of a full moon gleamed on her face. One of the watchmen came and blew his whistle. ‘Why not just once?’ he whispered. Veliman cursed and swore at him for many nights but finally she grew weary of staying up for Ali and stopped swearing. ‘All right’, she said, ‘for a price’. She struck a bargain with the watchman and led him to her bed. The watchman told others, and while Ali minded the pigs in the farmyard all the watchmen in the area left teeth marks on Veliman’s neck. She soon made a reputation as ‘watchmen’s Veliman’. She beat up three women from the huts who spoke and giggled behind her back, then went into her hut in a fury. She bared her neck at the window for the wind to blow dry the beads of sweat and as she sat looking up at the sky to get her breath back, the wife of one of the watchmen came pounding at her door. Veliman snatched up the bread knife and slashed the woman’s mouth and tore out her hair. In the end she left Bald Ali and disappeared. Then Ali gave up minding the pigs and started lamenting on the garbage hills. He shed as many tears as the canfuls of water he had once sold on those roads. While he went about crying, Mr. Izak set up a makeshift factory on the slopes across the garbage hills and the hut people heard that workers were being taken on at the refrigerator factory. Ali broke off his lament for Veliman and joined the refrigerator workers.
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.