Hasan Toptas - Reckless

Then he waved. ‘What are doing, just standing there, you fool? Come when I call you.’

With a sinking heart, Ziya slowly crossed the road.

‘Put that bag on the ground,’ said the soldier coldly. ‘Open the zip!’

Ziya did as he was told.

His eyes fixed on the bag, the soldier said, ‘You think you’re coming to a five-star hotel, do you? Well, you can stick this up your cunt! Whatever we bring here, we carry on our backs!’

Ziya did not know what to think.

First the soldier poked through his laundry with the barrel of his rifle. In spite of himself, Ziya leaned over at this point, too, to watch the barrel of that rifle poking at his pants and socks and vests and pushing them from one side of the bag to the other.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, poking at the black plastic bag in the corner.

‘It’s my hair,’ Ziya said.

‘Your hair, is it? So tell me, boy,’ said the soldier in a mocking voice. ‘Where did you get your hair cut?’

‘In Diyarbakır.’

‘And then you didn’t have the heart to throw it away, so you asked the barber to give it back, and put it into this bag. Am I right?’

Ziya said nothing.

‘I’ve asked you a question, boy!’ the soldier roared. ‘Are you waiting for the sergeant major’s horse to fart?’

‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Ziya. ‘I didn’t have the heart to throw it away.’

‘I didn’t have the heart to throw it away, sir !’

‘I didn’t have the heart to throw it away, sir.’

‘So now. Take that hair of yours, and take it over to that dustbin on the other side of the road there, and toss it in. Now!’

Ziya rushed over to the bin, tossed his hair away, and came back.

The soldier was waiting for him. He seemed to have grown in stature. He was holding his rifle crossways.

‘Now pick up your bag and go inside,’ he said, in a voice so harsh it almost slapped him across the face.

Ziya did not want to pick up his bag just then. He wanted to kick it high in the air, and send it flying far away, to a place no one knew, but of course he did no such thing. He had no choice but to bend down slowly, pick up the bag, and walk on to the grey building between the trees.

‘Keep walking, oh bird of God!’ the soldier shouted after him. ‘Keep walking!’

Ziya shot a look over his shoulder. As far away as he was, the soldier in the guardhouse seemed even taller than before. And it seemed to Ziya as if he was no longer walking up and down the guardhouse’s concrete porch. He was walking up and down his own greatness.

All the way to the building, those words echoed painfully inside him. ‘Keep walking, oh bird of God!’ Then he caught sight of the men waiting to the left of the building, holding bags of all colours, and he crossed the large, sandy courtyard to join them. Actually, he did not join them, he kept himself slightly apart, but even so they pulled him into their silence. And there he stood at the edge of that crowd, with those hundreds of men waiting tensely, clutching their bags, looking as helpless as a flock of lost sparrows. They started telling people where they were from, and if there were five of them from the same city, they formed their own group, and talked amongst themselves. And little by little, these conversations spread, and as the scorching sun beat down on them, their voices rose and fell. Then a fat-legged, fat-assed sergeant appeared at the door of the grey building. Strutting down to stand before them, he raised his eyes to the sky and waited, unmoving, for all those voices to die down. The young men didn’t know how to read him, though, and so they continued talking, as casually as they could in such a situation. But that was when the sergeant let out a bellow that seemed to come from his eyes as well as his mouth. ‘Silence, you fools! Before you turn this place into a girls’ bathroom. Silence!’

The new recruits fell silent.

And then this sergeant launched into a never-ending speech. One short, cold sentence after another. What they had to do. How they were to behave. And then, after glancing at his watch, he ordered them to line up two by two, no matter what size they were. At once! No one knew what to do when they heard that, so some went running right and left, some stayed put, some backed up until they bumped into someone, and there were even some who pulled the person next to them by the arm, as if they were having a fight. Meanwhile the sergeant just stood there looking sternly at his watch. After a minute had passed, he turned back to the building, taking this crowd with him, to lead them down a gloomy corridor with grey double doors on either side, while he strutted and swayed as affably as if he were leading those behind him to inherit the earth. But by now the new recruits were wary of speaking too loudly, and that’s why they looked around them carefully before exchanging whispers. And soon these whispers had melted into their footsteps, creating an odd noise that the corridor seemed to compress, making it sound more menacing than it really was. And that was when one of the doors along the corridor cracked open, and out came a huge, frowning, buttoned-up sergeant, and no sooner had he come out than he set upon the crowd, kicking and beating all who stood in his way with a ferocity that knew no bounds. And all the while he bellowed, ‘Who do they think they are, these shameless louts! You think you can make noise like that in here? You think we’ll put up with noise like that?’ When he heard the commotion, the sergeant at the front came back, of course. Jumping up as high as he could, he set about beating up anyone in his reach. And with all this confusion, it wasn’t long before everyone was getting hit, even the silent and defeated ones who were cowering in the middle. Those not yet inside had no idea what had caused this uproar, which ended as suddenly as it had begun; they just stood there craning their necks, trying to see over the other recruits’ shoulders.

In the face of all this, even those who had escaped a beating felt angry, but no one wished to invite trouble on their very first day, so no one spoke. Ziya said nothing either. He just went into the depot, purple-faced, and when it was his turn, he picked up his uniform, went up to the dormitory on the third floor and, as quickly as he could, he got dressed. Putting the clothes he’d brought with him into a white plastic bag, he handed it to the orderlies who were waiting at the door and would post them back to his father. Then off he strode towards the stairs, and he was just about to head down when he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror to the left, and what he saw shocked him. Because the man staring out at him, with his clown costume and his cap pulled down over his ears, seemed like someone else altogether. Especially those trousers, which looked like sacks, and those huge combat boots, and that expression of surprise on his face — here was a clown who could make you laugh until you cried. And that was why Ziya didn’t look at him too long. To keep from looking, he fairly flew down those concrete steps.

Early the next morning, they assembled on the field that ran alongside the mess hall, and here they learned that a squad was made up of ten men, which with the leader made eleven. Four squads made a platoon, and four platoons made a company. After they were told all this, they were told to step out of line to make new lines. And in this new line, they took account of differences in size, of course. They shuffled the recruits about, keeping some in the squads where they were and moving others. The stub-nosed sergeant in charge of Ziya’s platoon was more particular about this business than the other sergeants. He would stand to one side and close one eye and give each squad a long, hard look, calculating and recalculating every last millimetre of difference, and then he’d race around, saying, no, that’s not the right place for you, boy, not the right place at all, and he’d change them around. And then he’d race around again, anxiously inspecting the whole platoon. And then he came up to Ziya. ‘This is not the right place for you,’ he said. And he pulled him by the arm and put him into the second row of the second squad, and then, for a moment, he just stood there, giving him a very odd look.