The tears pouring from Grey Hamit’s eyes became a torrent which swept the women to the factory door. As they were carried away crying and shouting, Hamit wiped his eyes on the blue flag he held. He stood up in triumph and asked for Granny Dursune’s hut: he had heard of her in the factories in the days of the hut wreckers. He began to run down the stream. Granny Dursune looked at Grey Hamit’s face smeared with earth and at his blue apron but she could not recognize the man diving breathlessly into her hut. ‘It must be one of us, but which one?’ she muttered. When she had listened to him she stuck a pistol into the waist band of her baggy trousers and marched from her hut.
~ ~ ~
Where Granny Dursune had sat herself down during the protest days, with the pistol in her baggy trousers, Mr. Izak later covered the spot with asphalt, drowning the screams from the women and girls of the hut community in tar, and opening the two main doors of his factory onto this square. The workers paced out the ground and found the spot where Granny Dursune had pulled the gun on Mr. Izak, and this became the meeting place of the fridge workers greeting each other at night-shift. When the workers were released from the underground machines and staggered to the surface, they raised their arms and breathed in deeply as they met the men on night-shift duty. With narrowed eyes and anxious hearts, the night-shift workers closely watched the men appearing from the doors which opened into darkness. ‘More power to your lungs!’ they murmured. They touched one another on the shoulder as they separated and the fresh air tore at the lungs of the emerging workers. Daylight pierced their pupils like a needle and their tired arms shielded eyes blinking with pain. The watchmen halted the men shading their eyes.
Have you taken, have you stolen
Mr. Izak’s wires and bolts?
That is banned.
Bring your arm down, show your hand.
Mr. Izak’s watchmen, recruited from the hut people, searched the workers while they were still dizzy and aching, but would find nothing but traces of work on their clothes, hands and armpits. Spots of white paint from the job had dropped like white feathers on the painters’ shoes while they were at work. They had stuck cloth caps on their heads so their hair would not turn white in a single day and had the idea of making sweatcloths out of the refrigerator polishing rags which they hung around their necks and held to their mouths as masks while they worked. At the start of the factory dinner break, workers in the deeper sections who had to pass through pitch-black corridors would wait for the painters to come out first so as not to miss the canteen door. The corridors would turn white from the drops scattered by the painters from their faces, hands and caps.
Painters, white doves.
The polishers would drop their sandpaper and straighten up holding their tired aching backs. Their eyes met a pitch darkness as black as the metal dust sticking to their faces, and they lost their way even in the white-painted corridors. Their black faces merged with the dark and disappeared. To get rid of the oily black they used to wash before coming up to the surface, then rushed from the hot water desperate to clear their stifled lungs and blow out the metal dust lodged in their throats as soon as they could. ‘The man in a hurry is streaked with black’, they said. A black streak as thick as an eyebrow would remain somewhere on their faces. They would go home shivering, their hair wet-combed and traces of work on their noses and foreheads.
Polishers with black-streaked foreheads.
The metal workers laughed the loudest at these marks left in haste. As they laughed they used to bang their files on the hammers and cup their hands round their mouths and the rust from their hands would smear their lips and faces.
Metalworker giants, big-mouthed with rust.
The giant workers were pale but fiery-eyed, and their hearts were wrought of iron. Their workshop was down in the depths of the factory. Iron filings and rust rained on their lashes and filled their eyes, their pupils dry as dust. Even as they jeered at the polishers a cold anger lingered in their eyes. While they worked their ears were deaf to each other so they threw away their hammers and shouted in unison. Their shouts travelled up to the surface of Rubbish Road, and the factory workers there believed these shouts would cast a magic spell. Whenever the garbage hills echoed with the metalworkers’ cries, all the fridge workers would come up to the surface and pitch a tent at the factory gate. They wrote all over the doors and windows and hung the tarry square with inscribed banners waving as the wind blew.
Whenever the fridge workers appeared at the surface the men from the Rubbish Road factories would hastily report that the lathemen did not want to join the strike and that the metalworkers had beaten them up with their iron rods and thrown them out. Every factory added a new angle to the tale and different stories accumulated. The hut community heard that someone had written on the door of Mr. Izak’s ironworks, ‘No metalworks — no rights’. Before they could make sense of this, news spread on Rubbish Road and the garbage hills that the lathemen wanted to pitch a mosque tent beside the strike tent. This got mixed up with the story of Mr. Izak’s house with its indoor pool and his wife’s youth and beauty. But no one talked about his wife’s beauty once it was overshadowed by a rumour that underground Mr. Izak was making parts for firearms. The hut people eyed the fridge factory with hundreds of questions in their heads.
The era of the squatter factories on the garbage hills ended with these hundreds of unspoken questions. The workers’ songs mingled with the hodja’s voice — from the mosque built by Mr. Izak — as he preached that a strike meant pitching a tent against God. All these sounds got lost in the screechings of the seagulls, the noise of the refuse drums, and the hum of the community. The garbage hills never stayed still and after every protest the trucks dumped the city’s rubbish a little further from the huts. The huts multiplied as they tried to keep up with the trucks and every night their fences moved nearer to the new garbage heaps. After witnessing the founding of Flower Hill, Mr. Izak suddenly disappeared. He had signed his name clearly in chemicals on the skies above the garbage hills, and he left the direction of his factory to the managers and to the day and night foremen. The garbage hills saw him no more.
The man who wrecked the huts has gone
The man who woke the dead has fled
To distant lands and homes with pools.
He feared the garbage birds.
Fridge-gas has stung him till he cries,
He runs away with streaming eyes.
The fridges go by lorryload
The workers had to tramp the road.
Mr. Izak’s departure was like Kurd Cemal’s. His physical body disappeared from the garbage hills but his name remained, inscribed in their heavens. After Kurd Cemal joined the Town Council they heard he was to set up another big factory which would turn out industrial refrigerators on Panty Way. And after a time his factory materialised.