The hut people condemned the men who had encouraged the women to go into the street and get beaten up. They argued fiercely about male honour being represented by women, and they all agreed that at the next flare-up the men should not stand back and let the women go into the front line.
While angry shouts were being exchanged on this subject in the workers’ settlement, Simit-seller Mikail began to do an impersonation of a worker on Flower Hill hit by a stone at the base of his neck. He clutched his neck and crashed to the ground at the hut people’s feet. Their eyes were wide with excitement and as he looked at them, he yelled, ‘Save me!’ Then he got up and suddenly turned into a policeman. While he was running off he got caught among the wires over the road. Hands raised, he mimicked the policeman gasping with terror, and the hut people couldn’t help laughing at his antics. He dropped his hands to his sides and said that if a general (which he pronounced ‘gerenal’) stopped a worker on the march and asked him where he was going, the worker would be nonplussed. Comparing the workers to quarrelsome colts, he swore they had no idea where they were going. What he said about the generals showed his real feelings. He summed it up in a simple phrase
Suppose the generals had met
The men on Asphalt Road
This final phrase of Simit-seller Mikail, who had looked on the torrent of workers with his eyes full of poetry, was the gem among the myriad words uttered on Flower Hill after the march. And whoever heard it laughed till they cried. While he was selling his simits and mimicking the birdsong on Rubbish Road, tears rolled down people’s cheeks. As he watched he imagined his name shining high above Flower Hill. But he wasn’t chosen from the hut people to become a star, for one morning before daybreak a fire broke out and burned the cardboard houses to ashes. The gem lay buried beneath.
~ ~ ~
One of the garbage tales, known as ‘The Great Garbage Fire’ was about Chief Mahmut, the head of the gypsies, and Crazy Dursun the squatter and the five gypsies who died by fire. It ran on and on in couplets that were rooted in the speech of the squatters who lived on the garbage hills.
From the rooftop Crazy Dursun had a view
Of the gurgling kettle as it poured its brew.
‘The gurgling kettle’ was the name the Flower Hill folk gave to Chief Mahmut’s samovar which stood in the gypsy chief’s cardboard residence. It was a magnificent creation, with its slender tubes dovetailed together and the big shining teapot with its strainer. Chief Mahmut would sit cross-legged by this samovar that gleamed like a mirror, while he crowned the hut people’s rotten teeth. Everyone who entered the chief’s cardboard house came out equipped with teeth gleaming like tinned copper and delighted with the gypsy tales dropping from Mahmut’s lips. Chief Mahmut was not only expert at crowning teeth but also at filling the gaps with teeth as good as real. He re-silvered mirrors and re-tinned pots and pans. He had seven wives and twenty-one children. But the apple of his eye was his youngest wife Zülika whom he was said to have kidnapped. She was a Posha gypsy. Squatters who entered Chief Mahmut’s cardboard abode were dazzled by Zülika and she became famous on Flower Hill. Her sparkling teeth bright as the full moon, her crescent eyebrows and long wavy hair that swung at her heels in a knot created the ‘Posha legend’ and the belief that the beauty of the Posha gypsies was fatal.
While Zülika was the sole subject of conversation devoured by the hut people, Crazy Dursun of Flower Hill left his mother’s hut and settled by the gurgling kettle at Chief Mahmut’s knee. He never stuck his head outside the house of cardboard. Crazy Dursun’s migration from Flower Hill to the cardboard houses gave rise to a string of jokes. Then these subsided and rumours grew that Ziilika had been seen going down Panty Way at the dead of night having fun with Crazy Dursun in the breezeblock yards. These rumours reached Chief Mahmut’s ears while he was silvering a mirror by his gurgling kettle. But he just looked in the mirror and laughed, showing his gleaming teeth, his own handiwork.
Three years before he moved to the cardboard houses Crazy Dursun used to polish shoes on Rubbish Road. One midday as he was dozing off by his shoe box, his shaved head burned in the sun’s rays and he got sunstroke. His brain seethed. The brush he held rolled out of his hand and he too fell to the ground. He began to thrash about; banging his head to right and left, he collapsed exhausted and fell asleep in the arms of two watchmen from the factory. For three years he never rose from his bed but lay breathing deeply, subjected to all kinds of attempts to cure him by the Flower Hill people. The illness, which befell him in his fourteenth year, eventually cleared up in his seventeenth but left him in a dazed condition. His chin which had slipped over to his left ear righted itself but his wandering wits never came back to their nest and kept rocking like a cradle inside his head. On account of the tumult in his head his eyebrows were set in a moody frown and he wore a peevish angry expression. During the day he would take his peevishness through the Flower Hill streets; at night he was inconsolable. He undid his shirt buttons in a fit of distress and punched himself repeatedly until he was panting and groaning, and when the Flower Hill people had gone to bed he rushed outside, then beat on their doors with all his strength. ‘Hey, get up! I’m in a bad way!’ he shouted and cursed the sleepers. If anyone opened the door he slipped in and sat in the best seat, breathing hard with anger. But the community had had enough of Crazy Dursun’s night time visitations. In the alleys of Flower Hill his whole body would be seized with convulsions, and when the fit was over he would lie down motionless on the road to sleep off his exhaustion.
One night when he rushed out in one of his fits his attention was caught by the sounds of music. He discovered Chief Mahmut’s headquarters on top of the garbage mounds, and from that night he left the squatters’ doors in peace. But as he gazed and gazed into Zülika’s dark eyes he was stricken for the second time. His heart burned with love, and Crazy Dursun began to fear Zülika with her burning dark eyes. He ran away from Chief Mahmut’s house and climbed up to his mother’s roof. And for days and nights on end he kept unbroken watch on the cardboard house where Zülika lived.
Towards the end of summer he saw policemen approaching the garbage mounds and he left his post. His ears were full of the grumblings of the gypsies’ bears and the gulls beating their wings on the rooftops.