Hasan Toptas - Reckless

Ziya apologised but Hayati was in too much of a rush to hear him, and even when he was inside, doing his business, he kept ranting. ‘You can’t clean things every day in conditions like this, my dear friend. There’s such a thing as common sense. Here we are, living in these jerry-built huts without bathrooms, without toilets, and what am I supposed to say to these half-witted bastards who are condemned to shaving in front of that mirror we’ve hung from the almond tree? Which of us deserves this miserable life we’re living? And anyway, I’ve been here now for thirteen months, and I’ve done time in every station in the company, and I’ve met each and every one of the men working in them, but I haven’t seen a single rich boy, or a single man who’s ever picked up a book. And if there is a single slave of God who can tell me otherwise, let him speak. Every night, we lay our lives on the line, guarding that border, and if there’s fog in the morning, we wait there until it’s cleared, and then, when they drag us back,well. . just look at this food they give us, you’d need a thousand witnesses to find just one man who’d call it food! And then there’s our drinking water, or rather, the stale green water we have to pull from the well every day, that we share with the snakes and the frogs and the bloodsuckers and the bugs. And then there’s this place where we have to wash. Let’s face it. Not even a dog would want to wash in there! Soldiers who aren’t posted to the border — they do guard duty two hours a week, tops. And all of them, all of them, get to wash themselves in sparkling tiled bathrooms. And you can be sure they don’t have to pour water over their heads from tin cans, like we do. And what about those letters we spend so much time writing? After pouring all our dreams into them and all our desperate longing, and signing them with our secret tears, who do we give them to? The drivers! And then what do they do? Well, they grab them away from us and toss them into the glove compartment or the pocket in the door, with all that white lead dust. When it comes time for them to post them, well only God knows what happens then! Osman! Just tell me, my fine young man! How many months has it been since you ate roasted meat? And OK, how long since you enjoyed a plate of stewed fruit? How long has it been since you had a chance to walk down a lane, or an avenue? Tell me now, so that these clouds can hear you! Go on, tell me, so that those two lost souls in those graves can hear you, too! Who would spend a day in this godforsaken place, if they had any money at all? Tell me, my fine young blade. Osman, are you still there?’

‘I’m still here,’ said Osman of Selçuk, as he swung from side to side, ‘but you’d better hurry up, my friend! If you don’t stop wagging your tongue like that and get down to business, I’m going to shit my pants!’

‘I’m right, though, aren’t I?’ cried Hayati, like a voice from beyond. ‘If I’m not right, you just go ahead and tell me, right to my face! But let me tell you, your tongue would burn if you did, and God would strike you down, turn you into a crooked old man!

‘I’m that already, you idiot!’ Osman of Selçuk craned his neck as far as it would go. ‘Come on now. Time to get out.’

And then he couldn’t stop himself. Turning towards Syria, and forgetting all the men trying to sleep in the dormitory, Osman raised his fist and bellowed, ‘Fuck off, you fucking village! Fuck off!’

And when Hayati emerged from the outhouse, Osman managed to get himself in there before anyone else.

It was a calm and beaming Hayati who came to Ziya’s side then, and instead of asking him if he had caused him offence, he just looked into his eyes and apologised. And Ziya apologised to him again, and then the two of them stood there together for a time, exchanging wry smiles. They smiled as if they had somehow managed to discuss everything that needed to be discussed without either saying a word, and come to an understanding. After that they went to bed, but Ziya couldn’t get to sleep; he kept rearranging his pillow, and rolling over. And as he was lying there with his eyes closed, he kept thinking about those shadows he had shot at on his nineteenth day on the border, and wondering if any of them had taken his bullets. And then, even after so much time had passed, he could hear that gunfire, echoing in his ears, as loud as it had done that night, and after that, there was no going to sleep. And that was why he was so very tired when he went off on guard duty that night; he was paired up with Serdar of Velimeşe in Çorlu, at D-4, which was the furthest east of Seyrantepe’s stations.

A few hours later, they began to hear those cries ringing through the black night, echoing from station to station. Whoooop! Whooooop! Then he and Serdar got up to go on patrol. Pulling down their caps and slinging the rifles over their shoulders, they went off in their opposite directions. That night it seemed darker than ever before, and heavier, and with that extra dark and extra weight came a silence that even those whoops couldn’t budge. Back in the trench, Ziya was just about to take his piece of bread from his pocket when that silence slowly began to alter in texture. When the wind first swept in from the other edge of night, it brought with it a hissing, swishing sound that might have come from the empty spaces it was seeping through, or from the flatness of the grass it swept across. It travelled out in waves, and the wider it spread, the fainter it became, and soon it was lost. And then it returned, but this time there was no swish or hiss: it sounded like a whisper, an old, cracked, crumbling, half-forgotten whisper.

Just then, there was a crackle of gunfire to the west of Seyrantepe. Serdar and Ziya both jumped, turning to look in the direction of the gunfire. As they did so, they heard some angry Kalashnikovs joining in with their G-3 infantry rifles, and suddenly there were hundreds of bullets flying through the night. Amid all this gunfire, they could hear whinnying horses racing in all directions, and also shrieks, each one different than the one before, and each one more desperate.

‘I can’t be sure,’ said Serdar. ‘But that sounded like a herd of sheep. If that’s what it was, this is going to turn out badly. Very badly.’

They stuck their heads out of the trench, both of them, to look anxiously in the direction of the skirmish. They were still shooting up tracers from time to time: they would go up and up, drawing a thin red line across the night sky, and then, very suddenly, they would vanish.

‘Shouldn’t we go over there to help them?’ asked Ziya in a trembling voice.

‘Haven’t you learned anything in the past three months?’ said Serdar, strengthening his hold on his rifle. ‘It’s a crime to leave your station. They’ll have seen the tracers. Don’t worry — they’ll be out there with reinforcements soon enough. And anyway. What if the smugglers are making all that noise to the west, just so that they could box us in over there, and pass over to the east?’

‘You’re right,’ murmured Ziya.

And there they stayed till morning, trying to protect their territory, and watching the fire-fight to the west with growing trepidation. Whenever there was gunfire, the jeeps and trucks in the field behind them would sweep the night with their searchlights, of course. Later on, a truckload of soldiers from Viranşehir joined them, together with two panzer tanks, but in the end it was not possible to stop this flock of sheep crossing like a flood of dirty wool from Turkey into Syria. As soon as there was light in the sky, they went pouring out of border control and the stations to look over to the place where the skirmish had happened. The scene that met their eyes was heart-wrenching: seventy sheep in all, lying dead on the dirt path, and in no man’s land, and the minefield, and the railroad. There were wounded sheep amongst them, legs twitching as they took their last breaths. Two or three paces from the barbed wire, lying amongst the empty shells, were two horses whose bellies were riddled with bullet holes, and two men lying side by side. They were both wearing black shalwar trousers, and their scarves had been pulled off their heads. It had been Hayati of Acıpayam and Veysel Hoca in the trench just in front of them; Veysel Hoca was leaning on the wall, motionless and staring up at the sky, and letting out a light moan now and then, but it was Hayati, curled around his rifle, who’d been hit in his chest, and he had been dead for some time.