Flower Hill Industries drew the squatters away from the garbage hills which were then abandoned to Poet Teacher and the gulls. Poet Teacher wrote a long poem comparing the scavenger birds to his pupils. One evening when his heart was heavy and he wanted to read his poem to the birds he muttered it with downcast head and dragging footsteps. But the birds fluttered their wings indifferently at Poet Teacher; for them there was only one poem possible about the garbage hills. The hut people had written it long ago. It was not very long. It was quite brief and consisted of one line recited through screams, shouts and stone throwing.
‘Away with garbage!’
When garbage ceased to be a source of profit, rumours spread that the garbage flies would consume the squatters who would then breathe fire and flame at Garbage Owner and disown the garbage mounds. This, ‘Away with garbage’, which summed up the lives and experience of the squatters on the garbage hills, would be seen as the signal for action. The protest would be sparked off first by the gulls beating their wings and waking the sleeping babies, then flying skywards as they played the game of turning day into night. The birds would be stoned.
As a result of this state of affairs on the garbage hills, Poet Teacher’s poem to the birds remained unfinished. A screech-fight broke out between the gulls and the squatters. Bruised and sore, the birds dropped their feathers over the garbage trucks and flew off into the clouds. Poet Teacher, bird feathers on his shoulders, gazed into the dark clouds which the squatters called, ‘Bird cloud’ and withdrew from the garbage mounds. After the birds the truck drivers who transported garbage to the slopes were attacked under the screeching clouds.
It was common knowledge how long this protest would last. Whenever the truck drivers came to unload garbage the squatters would drag them from their vehicles, beat them up and put them to flight before they could empty their trucks. Every time a new settlement sprang up they played this game of tit-for-tat.
But this time the game was joined by Garbage Owner, the garbage watchmen and the hut women who tore the fronts of their dresses and lay down before the trucks. As the quarrel and debate dragged on over which particular hilltop they would inundate with the truck drivers’ blood, the gypsies’ takeover of the garbage hills disrupted the usual course of their protest.
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Although there was already a communal gypsy settlement among the hut quarters on the garbage hills, the Flower Hill people, busy with the garbage protest, assumed that the gypsies were merely migrants drawing breath as they passed through Flower Hill. But when the squatters had finished talking with them they knew that the gypsies had fallen in love with the magical coloured clouds rising to the heavens and would set up their own home on the garbage mounds along with a troupe of bears. Moreover, the gypsies would heal the wounds of the garbage gulls and search the garbage along with them for cardboard boxes to build houses to live in. Realizing this the squatters lost the urge to spill the truck drivers’ blood on the garbage hills and took a break from protesting. A discussion arose as to the origins of the gypsies and so Honking Alhas, expert in gypsy lore, was rescued from oblivion among the huts.
Honking Alhas’ livelihood resulted from his skill in erecting huts within the hour for inhabitants of other hilltops of the city. At the beginning of discussions he stood out for his wide knowledge of the gypsies who occupied the top of the garbage mounds, and of many more races as well. He declared the gypsies were people without a homeland or religion and, moreover, they were barbarians and on their identity cards was written ‘Romany’. He said ‘Romany’ meant a person of uncertain origin. He gave the hut people a further piece of knowledge — that the gypsies were descended from a mountain very far away, half hidden in the sky, its height unknown, and they had dispersed all over the world hundreds of years ago. The names of the countries they had gone to were all recorded in Honking Alhas’ mind. Quick as lightning he flashed out these names which the hut people were hearing for the first time and were quite unable to get their tongues round.
This flood of names which poured out in his honking pronunciation caused by a nasal obstruction, was inscribed in history, but the number of people in the world, let alone on the garbage hills, who knew these names now could be counted on one hand. To be able to imagine what it was like when the Romanies first settled in these parts, the squatters had to know about a certain ‘Ottoman Empire’. So Honking Alhas left aside the Romanies for a while, feeling he had to tell the squatters that where they now lived there had once been an empire of this name. The squatters wanted detailed and accurate information on the gypsies, but he filled their ears with accounts of sultans, imperial edicts, cities with streets inlaid with wood, and golden doorknockers. And when he had confounded them with all that history had written about the Ottoman Empire, he returned once more to the subject of the gypsies and pinpointed their most important characteristic. He said the gypsies were filthy and he blessed the sultan for issuing an edict to throw them out of the city whose inlaid streets they had defiled. He sighed as he told how, after the edict, the Romanies fled to the springs and reservoirs which supplied the city. They had passed into history as people who had polluted the water of this beautiful city where they lived. From his knowledge of history he affirmed that they would pollute Flower Hill and reduce it to an uninhabitable state. When he had described how the sultan chased them from the reservoirs and drove them out of the city and declared war on them, Alhas put his history back on the shelf. Gypsy women were very fat while the men were very slight, he said, and asked the hut people if they knew why this was so. They watched his mouth expectantly and laughed loud and long. Honking Alhas, nose in the air, answered his own question. He said the men swallowed pills which dissolved bones and shrivelled flesh and that they passed day and night in sleep and dreams. Every day their womenfolk plucked three hens each and ate them; this was why the gypsy women and girls were called ‘Gacos’ or ‘birds’.
Honking Alhas’ information about the gypsies roused such repercussions on Flower Hill that for days on end the main subject of inquiry was how the Gacos managed to find three hens a day to eat. All the other communities on the garbage hills heard about the pills that wafted people from dream to dream, and the stories of the three hens and the ‘clove’ of hashish — as Alhas used to call it. New information from the squatters who lived next to the gypsies mingled with Honking Alhas’ accounts. And in this way the Flower Hill folk learned about the gypsy weddings, their ways of quarrelling and swearing, their fondness for music and their versatility in a thousand and one ways. But Honking Alhas thought the Flower Hill folk still did not know enough about the gypsies and he re-opened the dusty pages of history. He told them how the Romanies had been chased from the city by the sultan, had rebelled against the Ottoman Empire and after a lengthy struggle had set up camp and brought a great city of tents into being. Honking Alhas rolled the name of this city round his tongue for days and when he repeated again and again that there was nowhere else in the world like it, they thought on Flower Hill that his knowledge was exhausted. But Alhas proved he knew more about the gypsies than anyone else on the garbage hills when he spoke of their inroads on this country in 1936, long after they had founded their city. After his account of this and certain other events, the Flower Hill people understood that no one could compete with Alhas on the history of the world and humanity. Long before anyone had heard of the words ‘hut’ and ‘garbage’, a situation had developed in one of the great countries of the world. It was known as the ‘Revolution’, but seemed to mean a human whirlwind. Herds of Romanies were living in this country, wandering about playing their music. After the human whirlwind had come to rest, the name of this country was recorded in history as ‘Communist’ and in the new order which came about an old and splendid name was darkened. As the gypsies were barbarians who did not conform to order, the name ‘Romany’ was erased from their identity papers and replaced by ‘Turk’. Thus in 1936 these non-conformers were trapped in their hordes among the Turks.