See: https://www.wattpad.com/1429942730-the-deserts-of-europe-the-nights-when-the-machines
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The nights when the machines were running hot
Father and I were never alone on the nights when the machines were running hot. Three or four lemur-like workers, who after years in the company were treated like day laborers, performed menial tasks in high masses of quiet self-evidence. Not being exposed to the weather, like the people working in construction and agriculture, was an advantage they could tell. Each man operated five machines. The wage share in the calculation was the smallest factor. The soles would have been insignificantly cheaper if we hadn't paid the unskilled workers at all.
Their wives also worked at Aleko-Schuh. It was enough for the women to bring home their own money; away from the arbitrariness of presumptuous farmers who, for generations, had fobbed off such women with pitiful wages for field work. They were still familiar with the wood heel production of the germination time, before the company had grown up with clamping sleeves that gave pencil heels inner stability.
Where everyone else saw light, everything remained dark for me. I felt rejected, unwanted and unloved from the very beginning. Granddad oscillated between apocalyptic fits and a delicacy of feeling in the atria of wondrous knowledge. He had the gift. It was given to him. This is how strangely the formulations developed, undoubtedly in a religious context. But in which one? We were not Christians. That was easy to establish. But the rest was so complicated that I didn't understand it for a long time.
Grandpa went after people with an axe. He courted my mother in front of my father. He was dripping with discontent and quarreled with murderous vehemence. He only considered one son a renegade because he had gone out on a weekend of his parents' absence instead of keeping an eye on the magic box commonly known as the Aleko shoe parts factory around the clock. That was treason. Others blew up their parents' houses as soon as they were storm-free for the first time, the uncle had only moved around the houses once. He then earned a fortune selling cooking pots at weekly markets and showed off his wealth in a gold Mercedes.
Today, the magic box is located in the industrial area of Kraichhain, but when Grandpa came from a Turkish village to the Hessian border zone directly on the border with Thuringia, there was only agricultural land and a picturesque overgrown medicinal garden. The trained shoemaker put a shed on a shaggy meadow. That was the beginning of Aleko-Shoe.
People see us as Turks, although there is no ethnic connection between us and the Turks. We are Lasen, originally from Guria, a Black Sea region in western Georgia. My ancestors emigrated to Turkey. In Turkish, the Black Sea is called Karadeniz. My grandparents came from near Düzce. My parents were also born there.
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