Reckless

by Hasan Ali Toptas

  It was not just while he was driving that Ahmet of Polatlı kept silent; even when they stepped down, he held his tongue. Even when they heard gunfire or flares rising in the sky, he said nothing. With a grimness that seemed to be part of the jeep itself, he did exactly as Ziya said. So that was why, as they were creeping slowly towards Mezartepe through a black night that was thick with the scent of grass, Ziya couldn’t bear it any more, and asked him why he never spoke.

  ‘I’m preparing myself to die at any moment,’ said Ahmet.

  His voice was as grim as his face.

  ‘I can understand that,’ said Ziya. ‘But there’s not even a skirmish going on right now.’

  ‘You don’t understand at all,’ said Ahmet, his voice quivering, and almost crying. ‘I’m not talking about a skirmish. That’s just a possibility. If that’s the fate that’s written on my forehead, then so be it. I’d die a martyr. But I’m not talking about something that might or might not happen. I’m talking about something that definitely will happen. I’m talking about something that is right in front of us, shouting in our face.’

  Instead of asking Ahmet what he meant, Ziya looked at him.

  ‘There isn’t a soldier in this place the commander hasn’t crushed, as you know full well,’ Ahmet continued, keeping his eyes on the road. ‘Everyone bears a grudge against him. They’re all waiting for their moment. And that’s why any of them could blow their top at any minute and pepper this jeep with their bullets. I’ll die at the hand of a soldier, that’s what I think. Wait and see. They’ll fire at the commander and they’ll end up shooting me with him, and for what?’

  ‘No! Impossible!’ said Ziya. The jeep was bobbing around so much that his voice sounded strangely thin. ‘Nothing like that’s going to happen. Don’t worry.’

  Ahmet swung around to fix him with a stare.

  ‘You’re very naïve,’ he said then. ‘The commander’s sending you out in the jeep so that they kill you thinking it’s him. You haven’t joined up the dots yet, I see.’

  ‘The truth is, it never even occurred to me,’ Ziya murmured.

  And as he did so, he shrank shivering into his seat. He was just straightening his rifle, which had slipped between his legs, when a gunshot rang through the night. First they couldn’t figure out what direction it was coming from. Stopping in the middle of the road, and turning off the searchlight and the headlights, they peered out into the night. When two flares went up near Boztepe Outpost, they turned around promptly. They barrelled down the road, passing the stations one by one, but there were no more gunshots, just a few faint whoops that made the black night blacker. Ahmet’s face was as rigid as if he were racing into the arms of death; he was pressing down on the accelerator as if to say, whatever shall be, shall be, but get it over with. As he drove he kept glancing with fearful eyes at the guards coming up to the side of the road. As they were racing past Ege Outpost in the direction of Boztepe, five panicky soldiers raised their arms in the air to get them to stop. With one voice they cried, Feyzullah has shot himself! Feyzullah has shot himself! And they raced towards the jeep, trailing their long shadows behind them. They followed them back to their post, of course, and there they found Feyzullah of Niğde, whose left arm had leaned on his gun fifteen minutes earlier and set off the trigger. Now he was lying dazed in a pool of blood. The hole in his arm was horribly large, and they had packed it with the lining from a parka, and to stop the bleeding they had tied his arm tightly with a strip of gauze, just above his elbow. Then they picked up Feyzullah and held him in their arms; and even though he protested, saying leave me here, I want to die, in a quivering little moan, they put him into the jeep and then they sent him on to Urfa. A week later, Mustafa of Yozgat, serving at Yıldıran Outpost, shot himself in the foot. They picked him up out of the grass and carried him weeping tears the size of chickpeas, and sent him off to Urfa, too. Reports were made of both incidents, of course, and statements taken from both men, after which Feyzullah of Niğde and Mustafa of Yozgat were both charged with acting in a manner unfit for the army.

  After seeing what happened to those two soldiers, Ziya gave himself over heart and soul to his poison. It was no longer enough just to drink in the canteen: he’d have Resul prepare him another bottle, which he would hide inside his parka and take out with him on night patrol. Because he expected to die at any minute and did not wish to arrive in the next world drunk, Ahmet of Polatlı refused to touch the stuff. He spent his nights with his fearful eyes on those guards who stood like ghosts on the roadside, with their rifles slung over their shoulders, and he spent his days circling the water pump, staring at the ground and speaking to no one. And every so often he would get into the jeep that stood next to the flagpole and just sit there, for hours on end. But all the while, he would keep glancing left and right, grimacing as anxiously as if he were on night patrol already, while bullets rained down on him. Whenever Ziya looked up from his typewriter, he would see him in that jeep. So when the day came that he did not see him there, he waited at first, thinking he might have gone to the toilet, and then he got up from his desk a few times to lean out the window and look around. And then Resul came rushing into the office. Twice he lunged forward, as if he was trying to ram a door, as in a panicked voice he cried, ‘Ahmet’s crossed over. By God, he’s crossed over!’

  ‘What do you mean, he’s crossed over?’

  ‘Crossed over to Syria! I saw it with my own eyes!’

  ‘We can’t let the commander find out,’ said Ziya, jumping up. ‘Come on now. Come with me.’ By the time he and Resul had gone through the barbed-wire fence, and crossed the tracks, and passed the well and come to the end of the mud-brick houses, they looked across the ploughed fields spraying gold dust in the midday sun and saw Ahmet racing into the depths of Syria. They caught up with him, breathless, at the entrance to a little treeless village. ‘We beg you,’ they implored. ‘Don’t fail your military service!’ Taking him by the arm, they dragged him back. Creeping silently around the rear of the company building to keep the commander from seeing, they took him into the office, but Ahmet was still struggling to free himself from their grasp. That was why, after they’d put him into a chair, they sat down next to him, one on each side, and tried to console him, as well as calm him down. ‘Would you like a little poison?’ they asked. ‘Shall we bring some up?’ But Ahmet wouldn’t answer this question; for five minutes, he remained silent, head bowed, and then he took a very deep breath and broke into sobs.

  The commander had woken up by now and was standing in the door of the room next to the guardhouse, looking very drowsy. Next to the flagpole, a soldier was shaving the head of another soldier who was crouching on the ground. He didn’t seem to be doing it quite right, because the soldier who was crouching on the ground kept turning around, white-eyed, to offer suggestions. Sometimes he fluttered his fingers back and forth in the air, to show him how it should be done. The other soldier would lean over and watch carefully from above, and nod. Just then, an open-topped jeep rolled in past the soldiers who had queued up in front of the toilet with their water cans, waiting for their turn to wash. In a cloud of dust, it wheeled to the right to come to a halt five paces in front of the commander. Out jumped a flushed, narrow-shouldered, humpbacked weed of a sergeant. As he loped over to the commander, it looked as if the wind was blowing him. His head bobbing, he began to tell the commander something with feverish intensity, pointing into the distance as he did so. And the commander stood there listening, still as a statue. Then he put his hands on his hips and for a time gazed down at the ground in silence. The sergeant fell silent, too. He stood with his hands at his sides, and his head bent. Then suddenly the commander raised his head, turned towards the office, and waved to Ziya to come straight over.

  Ziya left Resul in the office with the sobbing Ahmet and rushed over.

  ‘The clerk in the next company was shot in a skirmish last night,’ said the commander. ‘You are to go over there and show someone who can type how
to prepare the report. They’ll bring you back tomorrow. So now jump into that jeep!’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ said Ziya.

  And then he climbed into the back of the jeep and sat down on a black leather seat that was caked with dust. The sergeant piled in after him, looking very much like one of those stick figures in the sketches he did of incidents. With that they were off, and, tracked by clouds of dust, they sped down the road for six or seven hundred metres, and into the territory of the Yıldıran Outpost, and on they went, racing towards the horizon in silence. For about an hour, they watched yellow waves ripple across the empty sun-baked hills, as the minefield on their left grew thicker and then thinner, while on their right they passed one observation tower after another, and trenches that looked like open graves. At regular intervals, they also passed the grey prefabricated guardhouses perched on their hilltops like forgotten boxes. And then there were the waves of desolation, and the silences, and the things that seeped into those silences – the rustling of grass and the deep-blue skies – until at last they had arrived at company headquarters.

  When they got out of the jeep, the sergeant said, ‘Follow me,’ and led him straight into Capflyer’s office. This was at the front of a stone building that, with its high walls and crenulations, resembled a little desert fort. Capflyer was standing at the window, hands on hips, lost in thought. Slowly, very slowly, he turned around, and Ziya could see that his eyes were red, and puffy from lack of sleep. Slowly, very slowly, he returned to his desk and then he looked Ziya up and down, up and down, as if he could hardly believe he was there. And then off he went, huffing and puffing and angrily rubbing his face, as he explained how his clerk had been killed by smugglers and gave precise instructions for the report. He didn’t go into much detail, to tell the truth: all he said was that the previous night he had gone out in his jeep on night patrol as usual with his clerk, Rasim Benli, that at around three in the morning they had spotted a group of smugglers trying to cross over from Syria into Turkey, and that at the end of a skirmish lasting fifteen or twenty minutes, they had pushed them back. And also that these smugglers had left nothing behind, and that the battlefield was empty, on account of the smugglers having passed through the minefield, and he said all this through narrowed eyes, as if he was reading a book from a distance. And then, with a ballpoint pen he pulled out of his shirt pocket, he jotted down a few more details – where the skirmish had taken place, the names of the guards who had taken part, and the number of bullets used – and handed this piece of paper over to Ziya, and then, in a weary voice, he said, ‘Take this with you, my boy. Go over to that office and prepare the report at once.’

  The stick-figure sergeant gave him a curt nod and led him out of Capflyer’s office, and took him quickly down the corridor to an office at the other end. There was a row of seven windows in this office – one big one, and six little ones. The walls were milky white, radiating silence, and in the middle of that silence, a tall soldier stood waiting.

  ‘So this is going to be our new clerk,’ said the second lieutenant. ‘You’re to tell him what needs to be done and how. So sit down and get started.’

  And though the last thing he wanted to do right then was to sit in the chair of a clerk who’d just been killed, that is what he did. Putting Capflyer’s notes down on the desk, he pulled the typewriter closer to his chair and at once began to type. His student – the man the lieutenant had introduced as Cezmi – was a most nervous and absent-minded creature, and his drooping eyelids made him look as if he was already wafting through the world of dreams; knowing that his training was to last only a day, after which he would be expected to do any number of things alone, he bombarded Ziya with anxious questions at every opportunity. And every once in a while Ziya would stop typing to give him a proper answer, and every time he did so, he’d say, ‘But listen, every time you’re stuck or can’t figure something out, you can just pick up the phone and ask me.’ This would calm Cezmi down somewhat. He’d slip into the deathly silence of the corridor and return with two glasses of tea. But as soon as they’d drunk these teas and put the glasses to one side, he’d grow anxious again; standing up, he’d go over to the cupboard where they kept the dossiers, and stare at their spines. He’d pass his hands over the yellow envelopes piled up on the shelves, and rustle through the notebooks next to them, or he’d stand right next to Ziya, asking him whatever question was in his head, even if it happened to be one Ziya had already answered.

  The next afternoon, after Ziya had finished the document, put it into its dossier, and taken it into Capflyer’s office to be signed, Cezmi asked him a string of questions about the monthly statements he would need to prepare on the company’s provisions, equipment and personnel. Leaning against the table, Ziya answered his questions one by one, in plain language. Then he handed the dossier over to Cezmi and in a tired voice he said, ‘As there’s nothing left for me to do, I think it’s time for me to tell the lieutenant, so that they can get me back before dark.’

  Glancing at the dossier in his lap, Cezmi asked, ‘But does this report say, for instance, that the clerk was shot in the temple?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Ziya. ‘Was the clerk shot in the temple?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cezmi. ‘Somehow, in the pitch dark, those smugglers managed to hit him square in the temple.’

  Ziya went cold, and for a time he didn’t speak. And neither could he see or hear what was going on around. He just sat there, ears ringing, falling through the darkness of his mind.

  That same evening, they took him back in the same jeep, reaching Telhamut just as the sun sank into Syria. He was still very agitated: when he went into the room next to the guardhouse to give his oral report to the commander, his face was ashen and he could barely stand. And that was why, after looking him over, he said, with some reluctance, that Ziya was excused from night patrol this once. ‘Go and get some rest,’ he said. And then he adjusted the collar of his parka, which was hanging on the backs of his shoulders. ‘But don’t forget,’ he said. ‘From tomorrow you’re going back out on night patrol as usual, and also watering those saplings.’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ said Ziya.

  And when the commander had dismissed him with a wave, he went straight over to the canteen, even though he was covered with dust, and it was all he could do to put one combat boot in front of the other. He found Resul at the table, entering his daily accounts into his blue notebook. He looked up when the door creaked. Seeing Ziya, he put his pencil down on the notebook, very gently, and raised his head, ready for his friend’s report.

  ‘That won’t take you too long, I hope,’ said Ziya, settling into the chair opposite.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Resul. ‘Welcome back.’

  For a while Ziya stared blankly at the shelves.

  Then he whispered, ‘You don’t have any poison, do you? Please, pour me a glass of that blessed liquid.’

  Without a word of complaint, Resul brought out the bottle from the biscuit tin under the table and poured Ziya a glass. He did all this very slowly, and he kept stopping to stare straight into his friend’s eyes, eager for his report. Until he couldn’t bear it any longer, and gave voice to the question in his eyes. He sat back in his chair, as if to say that Ziya’s time was up. ‘I mean, really,’ he said reproachfully. ‘For two days now, people have been talking about this incident and nothing else, so are you or aren’t you going to tell me what exactly happened in this company right next to ours?’

  ‘I have nothing to tell you,’ Ziya said, emptying his glass in one gulp. Then he wrinkled up his face. ‘Fill this up for me again, why don’t you.’

  ‘Whether I fill it or not,’ said Resul, ‘that commander is going to catch us one of these days. And if he does, there’ll be hell to pay.’

  ‘Who cares?’

  ‘I say we go up to the top of the stairs, that way we can keep an eye on him.’

  ‘Fine, let’s go,’ said Ziya, as he emptied his second glass in one gulp.

 
They climbed up the internal stairs, settling down two steps from the top so that their heads and shoulders were outside. From here they could see the guardhouse, the mud-brick houses, the sand track and part of the front of their own building. The soldiers who were about to go out on guard duty were gathered around the flagpole, buckling their cartridge belts and putting on their parkas. Some were holding the bread they’d picked up on their way out of the mess hall. Then, on the sergeant’s command, they lined up and mounted their chargers, pulled out their bolt handles and, throwing their rifles over their shoulders, headed out to their trenches, like a string of weary ghosts. They had been gone for some time when the night engulfed those mud-brick houses in the dip behind the railroad tracks. The night engulfed the well then, too, and the train station, and the flagpole, and the pine saplings, and the guardhouse, and the fields around them. And that was when the commander suddenly came sailing out of his room and headed for the train tracks, his parka swinging from his shoulders. Passing through the barbed wire, he turned into a shadow, until the night that had already swallowed up those houses swallowed him up, too.

  ‘You’re overdoing it with this poison,’ said Resul. ‘If something goes wrong, there’s no going to the doctor, as you well know.’