In the early hours of the morning the children would gather on Wind-Curse Point and look out for the wreckers. One morning they flew down from the hill like birds and announced that a gang of men carrying gleaming pickaxes were heading straight for the huts. Before anyone could draw breath the gleaming pickaxes had attacked the hut walls. The hut people hurled themselves at the wreckers but were stopped by the trucks and, in a single moment, earth and huts became one. The wreckers shouldered their pickaxes and left, the trucks withdrew. The chilly light of day pierced the rubble and, as the roar of the engines faded, they all heard a thin, tremulous cry.
Sirma stood trembling before the ruins, embracing a complete, undamaged brick. As the other children gathered stones and bits of tin all over the hill, her trembling increased. Then she began to struggle and kick. She put down the brick and lay on it, tearing out handfuls of hair and throwing them to the wind. The women made a circle round her and tied her hands together. Holding her by her rough and matted hair, they shook her, scooped water on her face and stuffed a rag in her mouth to stop her teeth locking together. Exhausted with struggling, she fell quietly on the ground, her hands tied, and her eyes enormous. The women lit a fire and until morning she watched the people reassemble the huts by the dim light. In the morning Sirma’s mother dragged her to their own rebuilt hut, covered her up and untied her hands.
In the morning the wreckers came back. The hut people, bent double and collapsed with exhaustion, started up at the sound of approaching bulldozers. Blinking with fear, they dragged themselves from their huts and flung out mattresses and kilims and whatever was left. The bulldozers rolled methodically backwards and forwards over the huts, reducing the fragments of china and bricks to a fine dust, splintering the wood into neat fragments, and hurling aside the crumpled pieces of tin.
The bulldozers went roaring off as they had come, and the trucks withdrew. The workers watching from the factory windows went back to their machines without a word. As Sirma stood by the wreckage, she was seized with grief again and kicking up the brick dust behind the bulldozers, she plucked and tore her hair and dress and threw herself screaming on the ground. They tied her hands again and summoned the oldest member of the community, Güllü Baba, to recite the prayers which would heal her. He came feeling his way with his stick and squatting beside Sirma, he sought and found her twitching body. He turned his face towards the little girl shaking under his touch. Then he leant on his stick, murmured a long incantation and blew on her the breath of healing. As her tremors stilled under his touch, his heart suddenly swelled and, like Sirma, he too was seized by grief. When she shook and stretched her bound hands, he also shook. Then she saw tears pouring from Güllü Baba’s shrunken eyes, and she quietened and stopped shaking. Güllü Baba wiped his eyes and was quiet too. He bent down and held her bound hands and breathed on her mud-streaked face, saying ‘Don’t cry, little dove, they’ll free your hands; go and gather lots of tin.’ They untied her hands, and she made her way quietly through the surrounding crowd and began to collect the tin.
Behind her the people dispersed on the hill. In a moment the old plaster moulds and debris from the china factory turned into walls again. The men picked quarrels with the scavengers who ran away down to the stream. Plastic bags and baskets provided roofs for the huts; homes were built part rubble, part moulds, part shards. In the morning the wreckers kicked them to the ground. By night the hut people had erected mounds from all kinds of materials they had salvaged during the day from the garbage: metal, stone, wood. But in the morning the wreckers returned and razed them all to the ground again.
The destruction went on for exactly thirty-seven endless days, and after each raid the huts became a little smaller and gradually lost all resemblance to houses. The hut people seemed no longer human, smeared with dust, mud, garbage, their clothes in rags. Three babies died, weary of cold and destruction, and took wing to heaven before the very eyes of the wreckers. One old woman who had wounded one of the wreckers with a hatchet was marched off between two policemen and removed from the hill. The survivors were nearly dead from picking over the garbage and collecting pieces of tin.
Towards the end, not a single tree was left upright on the hill, and the garbage was reduced to shreds. Rusty tins, heads of light bulbs, china, cardboard boxes scavenged from the refuse, bottles, bits of plastic, and anything they could lay hands on, were all put to use in rebuilding the huts.
One morning they beat up a man who arrived in a snow-white car, introducing himself as Garbage Owner. They beat him up, and bits of flock from the torn mattresses stuck to the dried blood from his nose and mouth. There was nothing left now, neither mattress nor blankets, or shards of any use for building. The huts had become smaller and smaller; they were like dwarfs’ houses, and those too were swept away by the wind.
Bitterly the hut people watched their homes vanish with the wind. That night they took refuge in one of the buildings under construction at the start of Rubbish Road. The women and children withdrew to a corner, and the men sat round Güllü Baba. Sadly he leant his head on his hand and pondered for a long, long time. Then he rested his cheek on his walking stick and muttered. He advised them to squat in the building until the wreckers had forgotten the whereabouts of the hill where they had built their huts.
‘We’ll lay claim to the garbage and set up homes,’ he said.
Till late into the night they spoke of how they would collect bottles, bits of iron and plastic and sell them. As they talked, they saw gold and jewels in the garbage, then they closed their eyes dazzled with the glitter of precious stones and sank into sleep.
Wide awake, Sirma gazed into the dark and retraced a long train journey. She sat waiting with her mother under a stone bridge thinking all the passers-by looked like her elder brother. Gazing only at her brother’s face, she saw neither the houses lining the wide streets nor the sea, and so she was utterly bewildered when they entered a house in the city far smaller than their home. She was embarrassed and all that day avoided her father.
That night Sirma’s thoughts were full of the days when she had lived in her uncle’s house, but with the first light of morning her thoughts evaporated and she quietly slipped away from her mother’s arms and ran to the hill where their hut had stood. There she wandered about collecting broken glass, tiny stones, buttons, bottletops. Then she took a breath and sat down at the spot where she had torn her hair and out of the broken bits of glass, the old nylon comb with two teeth, the buttons and the bottletops, she made a tiny hut.
Later in the morning when the wreckers returned they saw a little girl on the hill playing house where the huts had been. They circled around her, then departed, and from that day on they never came back.
After giving the wreckers three days the hut people gathered at the garbage heap. They picked out a broken, splintered chunk of wood and with a piece of coal scrawled on it the letters ‘Battle Hill’. Then they carried it down and hung it on the wall of a workshop at the top of Rubbish Road. A month later this wooden nameplate was removed by two official-looking men and replaced by a blue metal plaque inscribed FLOWER HILL.