a sketch of the soap-maker's shop

the soap-maker can tell you where is anything in his shop.

he brings us tea in red mugs with the tea bags still in and steaming, and a box of sugar cubes from upstairs. when he goes back and forth you hear his shoes sticking to the ground which is tacky from soap.

his workshop is an open square room with too few power outlets. he's used plain white drapes to partition a quarter of the space off for finished products, leaving a big L shape to work in.

daylight comes in through frosted glass windows. there are different smells as you move in the space: that pink gas-station soap smell in one corner, in another corner cinnamon. in the heavy-duty area with hundred-litre double boilers and propane bunsen burners, there is a yeasty smell.

unvarnished softwood bookshelves along the outside walls. every bit of space between the half-finished bars and blocks of soap is taken up by stacks of labels, bags of dried flowers, herbs, power tools. then, in the smaller spaces still, more precise tools: pliers, rulers, knives, gluesticks, pencils. there is a box of glass jars. there is a box of latex gloves.

underneath the bookshelves are water cooler bottles, gallon jugs, buckets, empty pop bottles with clear or cloudy fluids. there are dozens of metal trays full of soap bits, malformed blobs and end pieces. on the top shelf, liquid soap in unlabelled bottles, some golden, some deep purple, with squirt tops. there is a row of empty plastic cups with precipitates in the bottoms and around the rims, and plastic sticks to stir what they once held.

back in the far corner there is a pallet of sodium hydroxide crystals in thick plastic bags, and an industrial scale, and oil drums, some that look like they've been cut open with a big can opener.

in the foreground, pairs of simple tables make the soap-maker's workbenches. there are wooden molds on the ground beneath, cube-shaped molds filled right up to the top. you can see how he has stirred them, right handed, the action being fossilized as the thick paste hardens.

then on top of the table there are big blocks of cured soap the colour of fat. the molds are made of sheets of wood held together with braces so you just undo the braces and the mold falls away, leaving a block with smooth sides and the stir-marks in the top.

nearby is a frame with taut wires to slice the big block into smaller blocks, and what looks like a cooker.

mo knows the soap-maker's craft. i do not. the two of them talk.

the finished bars are all stacked on a central table. there are a dozen different kinds. he's stacked them like you'd stack bricks around a well, tracing out a circle and building up. each stack has a label pinned on, handwritten in pen on a piece of scrap paper. some of the soaps are earthy colours. some are clear with candied chunks within. some are fruit coloured and have slices of white inside like fruitpeel, lemon, lime, orange. some are sticky to touch, some oily. some have texture.

the soap-maker has to get back to work. no rest for the soap-maker.

it is a short drive back to burhaniye. outside the shop is a lion out of plaster painted yellow and gold.