Hasan Toptas - Reckless

‘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 rustling 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.