While Lado was nostalgically inhaling the air of the garbage hills his wife set fire to his writings. For Lado this was the last straw. He divorced her, but because of his pain and rage he could not take up a pen again and in order to forget, he gave himself up to gambling once more.
Lado came to Flower Hill with two huge trucks laden with his nine children, his fifth wife and his furniture. The Flower Hill folk who came to watch whispered together, sized up Lado’s wife like in-laws, then gave him a hand with the furniture. Under the envious gaze of the squatter women he took down from the trucks strange armchairs embroidered with silver threads and cupboards with mirrors. Their eyes were dazzled by embroidered cloths, tapestry cushions and shiny quilts. There were those who silently counted Lado’s belongings one by one, and those who were envious of his wife. In the midst of the hut people’s sighs Lado threw his things indoors and slept the sleep of the gambler. From then on the Flower Hill people began to witness Lado’s true life-style. His wife grabbed the nine children they had brought and angrily threw them one by one into the street. ‘Lado wants to sleep. You’re a son of a bitch if you hang about’, she said, chasing the squatters from the door. She threw stones at anyone still hanging about. She crouched in the street by her door with a long stick and a skirtful of stones. The hut people dispersed, laughing and chattering. Lado’s wife never left the door until he woke up, and she kept the road quiet and clear of dogs, children, hens and squatters. When Lado got up and went tiptoeing to the coffeehouses in his gambling gear, his wife picked up the youngest child in her arms. Having left half the children behind to watch the house, and paired off the other half behind her, she set out to make herself better known to the squatters of Flower Hill. Strolling about amongst the huts she filled in the missing information about their lives. She described at length where they had lived before. She drew up accounts of the money Lado had lavished on her and told them proudly of his good qualities but she also wept and described how he beat her with a belt when she did not feel like sleeping with him. She cursed his previous wives one after the other and thumped the heads of the two children they had left behind as keepsakes. Led on by the crafty squatters to reveal her secrets, she forgot the time, while the women exchanged looks of amazement. She ignored the children who had dozed off around her and sat on into the small hours by the last door she had knocked at. Exhausted with gambling, Lado dragged his wife home and beat her until he made her yell. She wakened those who had struggled against her babble and who had finally managed to sleep. Nevertheless everyone on Flower Hill was delighted with all they had seen and heard in just one day.
Lado’s arrival hurried on a phase in Flower Hill’s history which would have happened even without him. This era was known by the title: ‘Before the spring season when the coffeehouses opened’. It was full to overflowing with the songs, abuse and curses of the women whose husbands went off to the coffeehouse. The Flower Hill women turned against Lado, whose only fault was to enliven the days with the bright colours he wore, his peculiar adventures, and his affectations. As he walked along stretching his arms out, elbows bent, and wiggling his fingers (curled and stiff from holding cards), the women rushed from their homes into the streets. Some spat whole-heartedly after him.
A man who had lost a loan of ten thousand lira to Lado came home to his hut before dawn with a length of twine and tried to hang himself from the ceiling. His wife cut him down and, weeping, sang this song:
I knewhe’d lost the game
When he didn’t meet my eye
I knewLado had wonand was
Deep in sleep when the birds
Chose another way to fly.
The Flower Hill men stopped their ears against these mournful songs and, profiting from Lado’s gambling skills and his inventive intelligence, developed all kinds of games and tricks designed to hoodwink their victims. The game which created the biggest impact — it made use of the ceilings being so low and so rotten — was the ‘Early Morning Suicide Game’. It spread amongst the women as well as the men who sold their wives’ gold jewellery for gambling, stole money from their wallets and sank heavily into debt. Three squatters who did not set up the game in quite the right way lost their lives at it. Street fights between men and women and raids on the coffeehouses by the children became daily events. The women waylaid Lado four times. They beat him up on three occasions and broke his chain with the devil’s head. Both of his waistcoats were torn to shreds, and his wife and children could no longer step into the street.
As a result of all this the gamblers developed a code of their own, talks that had preceded the card games gradually turning into ceremonies of ‘Respect for Gambling’. Every evening Lado put heart into them by recounting one of his adventures, and his listeners gave each other warm and lengthy handshakes. They attached iron bolts and nailed beams to the doors to prevent raids by the women, and a watch was set up to safeguard their gambling as it gradually bore fruit. Imitators of Lado appeared. It was deemed compulsory for every Flower Hill man to carry a pack of cards and dice instead of identification papers. Flower Hill differed from the other hut settlements in its zeal. It became a Gambler’s Paradise.
Meantime the women kept up a continuous rain of stones at the coffeehouse windows and as they broke them one by one and as the owners put in new windows yet another coffeehouse was built. The new coffeehouses were tacitly shared amongst the gamblers. Those who could beat their wives into submission in the late hours left the coffeehouses and went back to their huts. Others who had broken loose from home spread mattresses on the chairs and their conversation, subdued and desultory, gradually died away as they fell asleep. Sitting smugly among his gambling companions, Lado reached for his winnings. In a tremulous voice he counted out his money but every night as he counted sweet sleep fled from his bed. Gazing into the darkness he tossed and turned as he yearned for sleep. All the same he would not let anyone else on the garbage hills challenge his status. Pursued by the curses of screeching women, he went his way in search of sleep with a gambler’s trust in luck. And he was able to remain on Flower Hill until the son of Memet from the municipal police raided his gambling joint with a bread knife.
From the gamblers’ coffeehouses a faint light was still shimmering on the howling dogs. Memet’s wife who worked in the artificial detergent factory sat sighing and sleepless on the divan and, leaning her head against the window, she tearfully watched through the curtains a half moon and ten stars agleam in the sky. She pressed her roughened fingertips to her eyes and wept. Unable to bear his mother’s weeping, Yildirim grabbed the bread knife and rushed from the hut as though on horseback. By the time the sleepers had wakened to his mother’s cries Yildirim had reached the door of his father’s favourite coffeehouse. Prodding the gamblers’ watchman in the belly with the knife, he made him open the coffeehouse, then with his back to the door he showed his father the sharp blade he was holding. He trembled all over. ‘Have you no shame?’ he shouted and poured abuse on their obsession with gambling. He lectured them and declared that God would soon call them to account and that even tiny babies would pee on them. The gamblers sweated for shame, heads bent over the table, unable to look him in the face. Yıldınm felt sorry for them and began to speak gently in a way that touched their hearts. ‘I am the same age as your own children,’ he said. When he saw that some of the gamblers were weeping he went on at length, drawing energy from the knife he held. Memet got up and aimed a blow at his son who staggered and fell, then got back on his feet. Swearing viciously at his father Yildirim returned the blow. When Lado tried to enter the fray Yildirim stuck the knife in his belly then rushed out in fear, falling into the arms of the group of shouting women in front of the coffeehouse. Then he fainted, the babbling voices of the women exploding in his ears: ‘Kill the lot, sweetheart, we’ll look after you if you go to prison.’