TE23 Double Feature

Selim Özdo ğan

52 Factory Lane

As if he’d ever had them. As if he’d invented the device himself. Ceren will use the new telephone to develop a method for getting through to Turkey quicker than the others. She won’t press the numbers one after another, or even press redial. First of all she’ll just dial the international code, then, frowning, she’ll listen to the noises on the line, and once she’s heard a barely perceptible click , she’ll tap in the code for Turkey, then she’ll hold her breath and listen again. Unlike the others, it’ll rarely take her more than seven tries to hear a ringing at the other end of the line. Except at Ramadan, Eid or New Year, when it’s sheer luck to get through at all. Phone calls will get easier as the years pass, noticeably cheaper too, but they’ll never bring that much-anticipated change. Decades later, Gül will say: ‘Fuat has always believed in progress. That there was always something better, nicer and more comfortable out there somewhere. And we’ve had it good, the Lord be praised: we’re not starving, we’ve no need to fear having empty bellies one day. But that longing was always there, it’s just as God commands. We can just as much escape longing as we can escape death.’ 218

Gül frowns when her colleague Işık adds up how tight money is for her. This much to pay off the house in Turkey; this much for two hectares of land, the car repair, a little bit for her mother who has no one else to take care of her; this much for a television with a remote control, a new sofa because the springs are poking out of the old one. ‘We never seem to stop spending,’ Işık says. ‘We toil and work our fingers to the bone, but we barely manage to put a couple of coppers aside. Before you know it, another year’s passed and you’ve spent a heap of money on your holiday. The years go by and we don’t really notice; they flow by like water.’ ‘How much did you say you got this month?’ Işık tells her again. ‘I got a hundred marks less,’ Gül says, ‘but we did the exact same shifts.’ She can’t help remembering how it was in the sewing factory, where they said she was so badly paid because she didn’t have her papers. Tomorrow morning , she vows. First thing 219