Hasan Toptas - Reckless

At daybreak, the sergeant came back, bringing with him the soldiers from the other stations, and they all went out to the barbed wire to look at the field. There were, as far as they could see, no dead or wounded, and neither had they left anything behind. There were tracks about the width of five ploughs coming on to the field, and just a bit of the way in, long before they reached the other side, they looped away in all directions. Later on, the commander arrived in a cloud of dust to inspect the area where the incident had taken place. Stepping down from his jeep, he put his hands on his hips and took a good long look at the field.

‘So now,’ he said to Hayrullah. ‘Tell me what happened.’

Hayrullah gave a blow-by-blow account of what had happened, but of course he left out the whoop.

The commander left it there, asking no questions, and he didn’t so much as look at Ziya. He just stood there staring at his glistening, freshly shined combat boots, and listening to what Hayrullah had to say. Then he marched sternly back to his jeep, and climbed in.

Back at the outpost, they took a statement, and instead of saying that they had used forty-seven bullets back in the trench, it said they had used a hundred and forty-seven. This was because they were all short of bullets, and that was because the soldiers sometimes fired their rifles indiscriminately as time went on, sometimes just out of exasperation, and sometimes because they were about to be discharged and wanted to make sure nothing went wrong at the last moment. Some had used most of their bullets on the mosquitoes. Especially when the State Battery Farm put on its water sprinklers, those mosquitoes came out in force, and when they did, it felt as if there were dozens of lice crawling over the men’s groins and armpits and down the seams of their uniform. The mosquitoes came swarming in like clouds. All night long, they’d buzz annoyingly around their heads, and by morning their hands and faces would be covered with bites. If a driver was going to Viranşehir for provisions and ammunition, there were even those who begged him to bring them back plastic bags to put over their hands and heads while on guard duty. This, too, had its drawbacks, because if you were breathing inside a plastic bag, you misted it up, and so you had to keep reaching in to rub off the condensation, and when you did that, you dislodged the elastic band that kept the plastic bags on your hands. And that was when some soldiers lost their patience and tore those plastic bags off their heads, upon which the mosquitoes that had been sitting on their rifles rose up in clouds and zeroed in on them.

And this was why the extra hundred bullets that they included in their statement that day was not enough to meet the deficit at Seyrantepe Station. So from time to time, in an arrangement with the other stations in the area, they put flash suppressors down a few barrels to make those rifles sound like Kalashnikovs, and in the space of three weeks, they staged two fake skirmishes, claiming afterwards that it was thanks to their quick response that they had been able to drive back a group of smugglers who had been trying to sneak across the border with their horses, and when they went back to the station to make their statements, they claimed to have used far more bullets than could fit into a pouch.

Because they were new, the sergeant took Kenan and Ziya aside to issue a stern warning. ‘If you say a word about this to anyone, I’ll make sure you suffer,’ he said.

They both promised to say nothing.

They were, in any event, living in a daze, out there on the border, and in no shape to think about such things. Kenan was having nightmares, every time he lay down to sleep. He would wake up in a sweat at noon each day, and sit up on his bunk to scratch himself, and then he would tiptoe over to the door, trying not to wake anyone as he went, and then he would flit outside, like a shadow. Ziya would find him sitting under the almond tree, next to the graves, his face all screwed up and on the verge of tears. And then he would crouch down gently on the grass next to him, of course, and the two of them would stay there for a long time, gazing out at the border and the railroad and the lands of Syria beyond it. Sometimes, when they were sitting out there, they’d see the battered carriages of the Toros Express rolling down the tracks, and it was almost as if it was afraid to break the hush reigning over that border, because it wouldn’t sound its whistle even once, as it slithered across the earth like a dusty old snake towards Ceylanpınar or Gaziantep. As it faded into the skyline, the silence it left behind was hard to bear, and so, too, was the naked earth that filled it. And that was when Kenan would go pale, and let his shoulders sink a little lower. And he would get up suddenly, and leave Ziya where he was, and go behind the station to write his fiancée a letter. Or he would stay where he was, and take a deep breath, and say, ‘This really is the land that God fucked over. Just look at it. We don’t even have a little shop where we can go to buy matches.’

Sometimes, after looking long and hard at the dryness of the earth surrounding them, Kenan would begin to tell Ziya how beautiful his village was. For instance, one day he talked about the red-pine forest that wrapped itself around the village, while its depths throbbed and thundered. Another time, he spoke of the scent of thyme that floated down the slopes to lap against the courtyard gates. He spoke of the crystal-clear springs and brooks that wound through the forest, bubbling gently as they went. He spoke of the vineyards, and the orchards, and all the different types of fruit you could find in them, and the clacking grouse, and everywhere you looked, there were beds and beds of fragrant flowers, sparkling all the colours of the rainbow. He described all this in such detail, and with such pleasure, that Ziya could almost see Kenan’s village, there before his eyes. This cheered them both. Even the light in their eyes would change, and their expressions, too: you could see in them the lively intensity that only the hopeful can enjoy. But as soon as they stopped talking about that village, the joy would drain from their faces. And that was when Kenan would feel worse than before; he would stand up, saying that he needed to go get more sleep. Scraping his boots against the earth like a dark and weary ghost, he would make his way back to the dormitory.

He tried not to show it, but Ziya was just as miserable, really. He walked around looking tired and spent with no idea what to do. Not every day, but every other day, he would return from guard duty in the morning and draw a bucket of water from the well, and then he’d gather up some scrub and make a fire with it, and when it was hot, he would set about trying to wash himself in that wooden outhouse. The outhouse was so narrow that there was hardly room to bend down to the bucket to scoop water with his tin can, let alone stand up. And also, whenever Ziya headed into that stinking place with his steaming bucket of water, some of the others would, without fail, need to go to the toilet urgently, and they would stand there, four or five paces away, shouting, ‘Hurry up, man, or we’ll shit our pants.’ Hearing them shout like that, and seeing them through the blackened planks, he’d have to jump back into his clothes and come out, of course. Once he’d taken a little too long to pull himself together and get out of there. Hayati of Acıpayam was one of those standing outside, writhing in his white jockey shorts; now and again he would snap their elastic, and every time he did that, his eyes would bulge as he glared furiously at the door and ground his teeth. When he saw Ziya coming out, the anger went to his voice, and without meaning to, he cried, ‘Why does it have to be every other day, every other day? What are you scrubbing in there, a cunt?’