After the new manager had spoken he distributed forms and called on the men to resign from the union and sign the papers. The regulars rushed to sign, but the others looked at him askance, sharp as needles. He said he had come with a fever straight from his sickbed to the factory and asked them to hurry. ‘Don’t upset me, boys!’ he said. They laughed at the new manager and his ‘fever’. Master Gülbey detached himself from their jeer and squatted down by the metal plates; he took a hammer and hammered away at the distorted metal until he had straightened it all out.
Gülbey was a craftsman who had gone round the huts at night with union papers and had introduced the union to the factory. Everyone in Rubbish Road knew that Mr. Izak had pushed a case full of money at him to stop him; and there was delighted discussion in the factories of how Master Gülbey had untied the bundles of notes and scattered them like confetti among the men who waited quietly by their machines. Besides the confetti business he had also invented a one-man resistance show called ‘The Plastic Works Sit-in’, which went down in the history of their union and later spread to other factories on Rubbish Road. While Bully Boys still frequented Rubbish Road, Gülbey was caught with union cards on his person, for in those days he worked at a plastics press and was very keen on the union. Mr. Izak removed him and gave him no compensation. Master Gülbey refused to be parted from the machinery he had polished with his sweat and worn smooth by his breath over the years. When he was laid off he chained himself by the arms to his machine. This led to an uproar in the factory. He lay there pitifully curled up and declared he would stay there until the officials came from the Employment Office. Not a single man did any work in the factory until the officials were able to pinpoint the machine where Master Gülbey sat hung with chains and locks. The work shifts piled up. Night fell.
His eyes are welding flames,
His lashes iron rods.
Gülbey the Smith,
Gülbey
Now the men followed Gülbey back to their machines, pressed the pedals and grasped the hammers and handles of the welding machines. They seized linchpins and screws. The conveyor which moved from one worker to the next slowly began to turn. Nothing could be heard but the hiss of the welding, the hammering of the metal workers and the rumble of machinery. Now and then one of the men broke off and, climbing on to the storage depot, looked out for the four men planted outside.
Work went on with quiet urgency for two days in the fridge factory. On the third day production slowed down and, as the hammers softly caressed the metal discs, showers of sleet began to fall on the garbage hills. The flakes slid down the grey-painted windows until evening and the lights came on. The welding flames died down, machines were silent, the arms of the presses fell by their sides. The metalworkers rose up and threw down their hammers and one rushed forward to turn off the main switch. The men for the night shift filled up inside the factory in a rush. The welders with their tools rushed to the doors and windows which they bolted and welded, then a barrel was rolled into the middle. Taci Baba leapt up on the barrel. With eyes like huge plastic moulds, he shouted ‘Metal workers! Lathe workers!’ The veins on his neck swelled like cords; ‘May our resistance be successful,’ he said, calming his pounding heart with his right hand. He was roundly applauded and the men’s hands were stretched out to one another as though celebrating a festival. The headmen and foremen sneaked away quietly from the ‘hand-in-hand’ game and disappeared in the dark corridors. The ‘regulars’, confused and subdued in a corner watched the workers embracing. The lesser regulars watched longer, and while the more regulars grew more frightened, the makeshift mosques on the garbage slopes gave the call to prayer.
It was the month of Ramazan and ‘what’s more’, to use Bald Ali’s phrase, all the workers, regulars and irregulars, were fasting. At Mr. Izak’s unearthly yells they all broke their fast at the machines. While the gleaming sleet fell and vanished in the dark, trucks surrounded the factory and took over the garbage hills. Panic-stricken men, summoned from outside to vacate the factory, burned with the desire to escape and their eyes slid in fear to the dark corridors, the doors and windows.
Master Gülbey got the men together and squatted down. He declared he would bury anyone in the garbage mounds who tried to escape. The workers were trembling at Mr. Izak’s shouts and yells; Gülbey stopped up their nostrils flaring with fear. He climbed up on the roof of the storage depot, jumped on one of the runaway workers and knocked him down — the sleet washed away the blood which spouted from the runaway’s nose over the concrete.
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.