Reckless

by Hasan Ali Toptas

  ‘No one said anything about doctors,’ said Ziya. ‘In the hell we’re in, there aren’t even army doctors. And I know that.’

  The two fell silent. They stared sourly into their glasses, as if their fates were written in them. And as they did so, a breeze wafted in, a very light breeze that made them shudder, even as it soothed them with the scent of grass.

  ‘So tell me,’ said Resul, taking another sip from his glass. ‘Are you never going to say what happened in that company next to ours?’

  ‘There’s nothing to say,’ said Ziya wretchedly. ‘A giant millwheel, churning and churning. Mosquitoes buzzing in the background. Lice swarming. Guns going off everywhere. But cap or no cap, ambush or no ambush, that glorious millwheel keeps on grinding people up . . .’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Resul. ‘That’s what it’s doing. It’s grinding us up.’

  Again they fell silent. For half an hour, neither spoke. They just stared into the night. Every so often they could hear a whoop coming in from one of the nearer trenches to the east.

  ‘We’re turning into cologne,’ said Resul. ‘Inside and out.’

  ‘That’s fine with me,’ Ziya said softly.

  Resul put his glass down on the dark concrete step.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not drinking any more of it.’

  Ziya reached out for the bottle and balanced it between his legs. Just then, another whoop sailed in from the night, a strangled sort of moan. It didn’t come from the trenches to the east, though, and neither did it come from the trenches to the west. It seemed to come from the depths of Syria. Then a door swung open, very softly, in one of the mud-brick houses, releasing a fuzzy ball of bright yellow light. But now the door swung shut, taking the light with it, as the house sank back into the night.

  ‘Do you know what?’ said Ziya, turning to look at Resul. ‘I can’t really believe that what we’re living through here is really happening.’

  ‘When reality becomes too much to bear, it never does seem real,’ said Resul. ‘There’s nothing surprising about that.’

  Ziya bowed his head, and for a time he didn’t move.

  ‘Look,’ he said, pointing into the darkness behind their building. ‘That’s supposed to be a minefield, right? Hundreds of horses, and hundreds of people, and thousands of sheep have passed through there since I’ve been here. And all in the thick of night. Feeling their way, in zigzags and circles. But in all that time, not a single mine has gone off. It’s as if even the minefield doesn’t really exist.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ Resul protested. ‘Maybe they got lucky. Or maybe the earth has taken all it was fated to take, and that’s why nothing’s exploded.’

  Ziya retrieved the bottle from between his legs and poured some more into his almost empty glass.

  ‘That’s enough, I think,’ said Resul. ‘Your liver’s going to explode.’

  ‘Never mind,’ mumbled Ziya.

  And he continued drinking, in the same way and at the same rate, but after a time he was no longer in control of his movements, and then, very suddenly, his head fell to his chest. ‘You drank too much, my friend,’ Resul whispered. Taking him by the arm, he led him down the stairs and straight into the dormitory. Here he helped him remove his clothes, and once he had him lying on his cot, he pulled his threadbare brown blanket over him.

  ‘Even the pine saplings aren’t true,’ said Ziya, waving his hand. ‘Every day I water them, but before the day is out, the ground is dry again. Not the next day, do you hear what I’m saying? The ground goes dry the very same day. Resul, my boy, are you listening?’

  ‘I’m listening,’ Resul replied, ‘but keep your voice down, so the commander doesn’t hear you.’

  ‘Let him hear me,’ Ziya said.

  No sooner had he said that than he fell asleep.

  The next day he watered the saplings, of course, and then went back out on patrol with Ahmet of Polatlı. Holding his rifle between his legs, he sat in the front seat and combed the darkness with his searchlight, as they drove from one end of their stretch of border to the other, and so the months passed, in a cloud of cologne. And when the commander went off to groom himself after work, never once did he take pity on Ziya, and say, ‘You’re tired. Take the night off and rest.’ Quite the opposite. If circumstances kept them from getting to a skirmish fast enough, if that jeep that was beginning to look like a miracle on wheels happened to break down, or if they returned to headquarters in the morning just a bit too early, he lost his temper, and then there was no end to the curses Ziya and Ahmet of Polatlı had to bear. They just had to take all this shit from him and keep their mouths shut. When the commander acted like this, and when he saw those piles of bodies and animal carcasses piled up in the night, Ziya drank even more of Resul’s poison. From time to time, when no one was looking, he drank it in the office and the dormitory. Ahmet of Polatlı still wouldn’t touch it: instead he spent his shifts peering darkly into the night, watching those guards as they came into view at the roadsides. Once Ziya tried to force the bottle on him – and perhaps this was his way of forcing away the fear inside him. They were in the Seyrantepe area at the time, passing close to the trench where Hayati of Acıpayam had been shot. Ziya was busy with his bottle just then, so the searchlight was off; the dirt road stretched out before them, shivering in the headlights, and the night rose up from both sides of the road to press down on them, heavy and dense.

  ‘Have a drop or two, why don’t you,’ Ziya said. ‘It will calm you down.’

  ‘I don’t want any,’ said Ahmet.

  As he said this, he took his right hand off the wheel and pushed the bottle back.

  ‘You know best, I guess,’ Ziya murmured.

  Just then a huge explosion ripped through the darkness ahead; and flares flew up into the night, one after the other, from several different points. And it was as if a silence from far away came crowding in on them, while the silence that had engulfed them only moments earlier went flying into the distance, and for just a few seconds, they continued this back and forth, many thousands of times over. And then they could hear a machine gun, howling and on fire, slicing through the night. Ahmet of Polatlı put his foot on the accelerator of course, and they shot off in the direction of the Mezartepe Outpost and the skirmish. Sweeping the night with their searchlight, faster and faster, their hearts in the throats. Whenever there was a lull in the gunfire, they could hear screaming. Loud, sometimes. At other times, more like moans. And now and again, in the time it would take to wag a tail, a horse would whinny. As they drew closer, a bullet from a Kalashnikov struck their rear-view mirror, and Ahmet stopped short; cutting off their searchlight and headlights, they hit the ground. The fire was not just coming from Syria: there were as many as seven or eight Kalashnikovs firing on the guards in those trenches from the Turkish side. Once they worked this out, Ziya and Ahmet decided that there was no point in hiding behind that jeep like two dumb squashes; so as bullets continued to fly across the road, they crawled into a shallow ditch; lying shoulder to shoulder, they pointed their rifles in the direction of the Kalashnikovs and began to fire.

  It went on for half an hour, this skirmish, dying down only to intensify. And for that half hour, the hills to the west of Mezartepe Outpost were living hell. When the gunfire stopped altogether, Ziya and Ahmet lay gasping where they were, and there they stayed for some time, uncertain as to what might happen next. And when they were sure that the smugglers had turned back, they made themselves small and crawled down their ditch, heading towards the guards. Somewhere out there in the night – precisely where, they couldn’t say – someone was singing a song, or a lullaby. They couldn’t actually make out the words, which floated in and out of the silence that had come pouring back in after the gunfire. Sometimes the owner of this voice would stop. From fatigue, perhaps. Or to take a short rest. But then he would find his strength again and belt out the same song. Or lullaby, if that’s what it was. And then they heard footsteps. And then the rustlin
g of cloth, the padding of combat boots through black sand. They echoed through the night, these sounds, and then, from the same place, there came a resounding whoop. It did not rise into the air, though. It was almost as if a fatherly hand had dissolved into a sound, to reach anxiously into the darkness, to search for those it had lost. But no one called back to it. The elongated o’s just hung there in the night, like giant hoops. And after that there was no more question of narrowing their sights. One after the other, Ziya and Ahmet climbed out of their ditch. Clutching their rifles, they ran down the road.

  They arrived at the trench in time to see the sergeant from Mezartepe come running in from the west with his two watchmen. There was no sound coming from the trench, and, fearful that the men inside might be dead, the five of them went crunching over the empty shells to peer inside. They found Yasin of Hendek with his trembling arms wrapped around Mehmet of Elazığ. From time to time he let out a feeble moan that might have been a song, or a lullaby, elongating the i’s. Hiiiii! Hiiiii!

  ‘Are you all right?’ the sergeant asked them. ‘Were you hit?’

  ‘No,’ said Mehmet. ‘We weren’t.’

  ‘What’s up with Yasin, then?’

  ‘We got caught between two gunfights,’ Mehmet wailed. ‘We ran out of bullets.’

  The sergeant reached down to take Yasin’s hand, and with his other hand he took hold of Mehmet. He pulled them both out of the trench. As soon as he was out, Yasin squatted down amongst the empty shells. He was still shaking, and moaning, ‘Hiiiiii! Hiiiiii!’ He would stop only to start again.

  ‘He’s in shock, I think,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Mehmet said. ‘He got so scared when we ran out of bullets, he lost his mind, if you ask me.’

  For a few minutes they hovered around Yasin, uncertain what to do. Yasin, meanwhile, took no notice of them: he was looking, wild-eyed, at some other world. And trembling, of course. And making that strange sound. ‘Hiiiiiii! Hiiiiiii!’ Then the sergeant crouched down next to him, took him by the shoulders, and shook him like a tree. ‘Yasiiiin, come back to yourself, my boy. Yasiiiin!’ he cried, over and over. Seeing that this wasn’t working, one of the watchmen said, maybe he would come back to himself if we gave him two good punches. Still squatting, the sergeant raised his head as if in prayer. ‘How could you think of punching him in this state?’ he cried, and he bent his head. He was trying very hard not to cry. What the sergeant couldn’t do, the commander did, when he arrived about an hour later. Yasin was still squatting next to the trench, lost in his own world. The commander went up to him, looked him straight in the face, and then he punched him – a right hook, followed by a left hook. ‘Come back to yourself, soldier! Come baaaaack!’ But this didn’t work either. His strange chant just swung one way and then the other as it dissolved into the black wind. And that was when the commander rose slowly to his feet, and placed his hands on his hips. Lowering his head, as if to speak to the grass, he said, ‘He’s lost his mind, this one. Take him straight to Urfa.’

  A week after Yasin was taken to Urfa, the commander suddenly announced that his tour of duty on the border was over. In just a few hours, he had rushed through all the formalities, and emptied the room next to the guardhouse and left, without so much as a goodbye.

  The commander who came to replace him had no need for the room next to the guardhouse. He lodged with his family in a house on the State Battery Farm. He would coast in around noon, in a perfectly pressed uniform, all razor-sharp creases. He would visit the guardhouses and the headquarters, brushing the dust off his uniform as he went, and after issuing a number of instructions to the sergeants, he would climb back into his jeep and drive off. So the jeep was now stationed in front of his house at the State Battery Farm, because from time to time it would occur to him to get himself out of bed to go on night patrol. He and Ahmet of Polatlı would drive up and down along the barbed-wire fence, from one end of their territory to the other. He never even gave anyone the finger, this fair-skinned commander. He never even threatened to lose his temper or raise his voice. All he wanted was for everyone to know their responsibilities and do their job. And when he came to visit a guardhouse or company headquarters, his heart would seem to go out to these soldiers in his command. He seemed almost crestfallen. When he frowned, it was almost as if to say, ‘Dear boys, you’ve been to hell and back.’ And when he saw the narrow kitchens in which the cooks struggled to work, and the wooden outhouses, and the wells outside the guardhouses, and the cans, and the little broken mirrors dangling from the tree branches, he would turn his eyes away quickly, as if to stop himself from feeling too sorry for the soldiers, as if to keep their pain from blowing him in a wrong direction. And sometimes he would just plunge his hands into his pockets and stand there thinking – thinking about a better life he longed to live, in a better world, but without dwelling too long on the details of this life, which was nothing other than a tragicomedy, invented by children who’d outgrown childhood’s games. And after staring miserably at his feet for a time, he would climb back into his jeep, settle into his seat, with its torn cover and its bullet holes, and wave goodbye as he sped off down the road to Ceylanpınar.

  A number of things changed in Ziya’s life, of course, after this new commander arrived. He didn’t go out on night patrol with Ahmet of Polatlı any more. His rifle and his cartridge belt sat unused on his shelf. And so he would go up to the top of the steps every evening, and sit there until late at night, drinking poison. Resul would go up most nights and find him swaying like a lost ghost; he would guide him down the steps and put him into bed, whispering, ‘You’ve really drunk too much tonight, you really have.’ And then he’d cover him with his blanket. When the guards came back from their trenches in the morning, and poured into the dormitory, bringing with them the scent of grass and earth, Ziya would wake up and a wave of shame would pass through him. He would have breakfast with them and then he would sit down in front of his typewriter and work all day, all alone in that little room. And whenever Hayati of Acıpayam came into his head, or Feyzullah of Niğde, or Mustafa of Yozgat, or Rasim Benli, the clerk from the neighbouring company, he would rush outside, and seize the watering can, and – even though no one expected him to do this any more – water the pine saplings. That commander might have brought them here, just to make him suffer, but now that he was gone, watering these saplings no longer felt like torture. As certain as he was that his saplings would never grow, he still watered them, and whenever he watered them, he almost cried. And then he would leave the watering can next to the water pump, and head into the canteen, of course, and get started on the poison.

  A few hours before going out on guard duty, Kenan would join them; giving himself a good scratch, he would squat near the shelves and sip his glass of poison as slowly as if it were tea. He was no longer the person he once had been. For almost a year now, he’d been going out on guard duty in fear of death every night, and sitting in that trench until morning, with only a piece of bread in his pocket, and returning to the outpost only to sink into a nightmare, while lice and mosquitoes crawled all over him. This miserable routine and all the other indignities of his life had utterly crushed him. He tried to hide it, but his legs shook when he walked and even from a distance you could see how difficult it was for him to carry that rifle on his shoulder. That’s why they never gave him too much poison, even if he asked for it. And because they could not bring themselves to tell him why, they’d tried to turn it into a joke, saying, ‘Now why would you need more than that? You drink the stuff like tea!’ Kenan would turn away to stare at the path he’d soon be taking to the trench. He’d turn back from that hell he was already living, and try to smile. Then he would find an excuse to talk about his village, and in the little weedy voice he’d begin to describe its beauties, which by now had taken on a mythic aura. And as he spoke, his voice would grow stronger, and if a moment arrived when it was strong enough to conjure up a pasture of sun-dappled flowers, he would invi
te Resul and Ziya to come and see it with their own eyes. Biting his lower lip, and shaking his head in reverence, he would say, ‘Come and visit after we’re discharged, at any rate. You should see how beautiful it is, just once.’ And they would say, ‘We’ll do that. We promise.’ And Ziya in particular meant it. He had listened to Kenan speak about his village so many times that he had memorised its every detail, and those details were so large in his mind that he was sure that, even if he went there alone, he would know where to find them: the fountain and the coffeehouses, the dirt road that crossed the plain, the sheep pens and the tall poplars enclosing them, the vineyards and, just beyond them, the paths leading up into the red-pine forests. And that was why his cologne-fogged voice rang with such conviction, when he stared into his glass of poison and declared that even if Resul couldn’t make it, he would come to visit, no matter what it took. ‘I’m not dying without seeing it,’ he’d say each time. And Kenan would stand up, as happy as a child. Picking up his parka and his rifle, he’d say, ‘So wish me luck,’ and set off down the path, with his legs shaking.

  But one evening he set off down that path and couldn’t hold himself up. Before he had taken ten steps, he collapsed on the ground. Ziya saw this through the canteen window, and even though he was well and truly drunk by then, he rushed out to his side. He and the sergeant pulled him up, took off his cartridge belt, opened up his shirt, and threw water on his face. Kenan began to wheeze, and his whole body was shaking, and it was burning hot, too, with some sort of fever.

  ‘He can’t go out there in this condition,’ said Ziya, looking the sergeant in the face. ‘What do you think?’

  The sergeant seemed not to know what to think. He bowed his head.

  In the days that followed, Ziya did what he could to cheer Kenan up. If he saw his friend’s spirits sinking, Ziya would say, ‘Look at you, you’re skin and bones, there’s almost nothing left of you; we’re not letting you drink any of this, from now on, it’s forbidden.’ Kenan accepted the ban Ziya imposed on him without argument. He just bowed his head. So now, when he came to the canteen to squat next to the shelves, he’d rub his aching knees and nibble on the biscuits Resul gave him.