Hasan Toptas - Reckless

‘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.’

‘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.