Hasan Toptas - Reckless

When he reached the oak forest, he felt half dead, and that was why he sat down behind a rock for a while, to catch his breath. As he sat there, panting, he slowly craned his neck to look down at the crowd of men below. Twenty-five or thirty men in front, all holding clubs, and scattered behind them, another fifteen or twenty people holding things he couldn’t quite see, and they were all climbing up the hill. As he looked at them, he thought, ‘They can’t all be coming after me, surely the ones at the back have come out to stop those crazed brutes in the front.’ He even looked to see if he could find anyone amongst them who looked like Hulki Dede, but he couldn’t.

Then he got up and, so as not to be caught by the people still streaming up the slopes, he hurried out of the oak wood to run as fast as he could into the red-pine forest. Soon he had run all the way up to the nameless shadow at the top of the mountain and saw it was a ramshackle old hut, but by now he lacked the strength to walk a single step. So he crawled to a rock just outside it. He curled up at the foot of this rock and waited, quiet as a rabbit. His forehead, his cheeks, his shirt, his collar; they were all drenched in blood. But now he began to drift off to sleep. His eyelids grew heavy; his soul, too. And soon sleep had softened his aching head wounds, even. But he could still hear the voices of the men coming after him so his terror grew and grew. What if they caught up with him? He could hear their footsteps coming right up to the edge of the pines. Sometimes he even thought he could see the men’s faces, blackened with anger, and whenever he did, he curled up closer to the rock. Then he remembered something Binnaz Hanım had said. He who wishes to pray should also carry a stone to throw . Remembering those words, and thinking how bad it would be if he fell asleep, he walked twenty-five or thirty metres, until he’d reached the hut. He was bent over double by the time he got there. Dirt and dust, from top to toe. He could barely stand. That’s why he lifted his hand and pounded so hard on the door. And the wooden door echoed back.

I got up and pulled it open.

He burst into the room and threw his arms around me. Together we shut the door and limped slowly away from the window. Outside there were men running back and forth, shouting.

‘They’re looking for me,’ he said in a faint, dull voice.

I whispered gently into his ear. ‘I know.’

He lifted his head to look into my eyes. It was almost as if he didn’t believe he was right there beside me, with his hand on my shoulder, and talking.

‘Come,’ I said. ‘Let’s watch through the window.’

‘They might look in and see me,’ he said in a shaky voice.

‘They can’t,’ I said. ‘You can see out through these windows, but you can’t see from the outside in.’

‘Like sleep that has holes in it,’ he whispered.

I said nothing.

We went over to the window. The voices outside were getting a lot louder. It was just about possible to hear what the men were shouting to each other. Then suddenly they were there right in front of us, these men. One in front, and the others behind him, all bearing clubs. The man in front was Cabbar, and his face was red from anger. Red as a pomegranate. His hair flew wildly around his face. His shirt tails had come out of his trousers.

Seeing them, Ziya said, ‘You’re not going to hand me over, are you, if they come to the door?’

‘They won’t come to the door,’ I said.

He glanced at me suspiciously. Then he collapsed on to the divan next to the window. Curled up into a ball. And stared outside.

One of the men running through the pine forest turned to another and said, ‘I found him. I found him!’

The men in the forest turned on their heels and all came racing towards the place the voice had come from. For a while, the pine trees’ lower branches swayed, the stones and the pine cones hit against each other as they rolled across the ground, the high grass rose and fell, and the blue sky pulled back, as if to escape from the grasp of the trees.

‘Come on, where’s that pimp?’ yelled Cabbar. Angrily swinging his club through the empty air, he shouted, ‘Where’s he got to now?’

Numan was just behind him. Dark-faced. Grinding his teeth. Ready to kill every living soul in the world, and not just Ziya. The other villagers were standing at the ready, waiting for orders. Their anger seemed to be in their clubs, almost, and not themselves, as they swung them up and down through the air, sending tiny shivers through the forest.

‘So where is he?’ growled Cabbar. ‘Who was it that found that pimp? Who was it?’

‘I found him,’ said one of the villagers. ‘Look over here! Look! He’s lying curled up behind that rock!’

Clubs in hands, they raced over to the rock the villager had pointed out to them. When they vanished inside the pit, Ziya turned to look at me, as if to say, they’re not going to find me.

Then he turned his head again, to look outside.

There followed a short silence. The forest had frozen inside its own silence, almost. The branches went stiff, and the leaves, and the colours and the scents. Then two men came out from behind the rock. One was holding Ziya by the arms, and the other by his legs. Slowly they carried him away. The other men looked surprised. As they followed on after him, they lowered their clubs.

Ziya turned back to look at me.

In shock, he cried, ‘They found me!’

Agha (Ağa): An Ottoman era title generally associated with large land holdings. Rarely heard nowadays outside Turkey’s Southeast.

Ayran: A water and yoghurt drink similar to buttermilk.

Baba: Literally ‘father’. Also used as a honorific for older men or a term of friendly affection.

Bey: A title given to the leader of a tribe, including the early Ottomans, which later became a military rank and polite way of addressing men, equivalent to the feminine ‘hanım’.

Bismillah!: ‘In the name of God!’ Short for b-ismi-llāhir-rahmāni r-rahimi , ‘in the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful’. It is sometimes used as a battle cry.

Bulgur: A type of thick-grained wheat and the name of a dish made from it.

Dede: Literally ‘grandfather’. Also used as a honorific for older men and as a religious title.

Dervish (derviş): A member of an esoteric ( tasavvuf or Sufi) group within Islam who chooses to devote his or her life to following signs of God’s will rather than their own. This often amounts to a vow of poverty.

Divan: A type of long couch that rests on the floor.

Djinn (Cin): Supernatural spirits in Islam sometimes rendered in English as ‘genie’. There are good, bad and mischievous djinn, and they are still very much part of Turkish folk mythology.

Dönüm: An old unit of land, representing the amount that could be ploughed in a day. This varied from region to region according to custom and soil quality.

Gözleme: A type of savoury pastry pancake, often filled with cheese, meat or potato.

Hacı: One who has completed the hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca during the Feast of the Sacrifice (Eid al Adha, Turkish: Kurban Bayramı). Used as an honorific, denoting that its bearer is both successful enough to afford the journey and pious enough to go.

Halay: A folk dance popular at weddings, in which the dancers link fingers or arms and dance in a line.

Hanım: A polite title given to women. From an ancient feminisation of the word ‘khan’ as in Genghis (Nişanyan 2007).

Harmandalı: A traditional dance of the Aegean region, in which dancers dance alone with their arms in the air.

Halva: A type of crumbly sweet made from either semolina, flour or sesame seeds. In some parts of Turkey, flour halva is traditionally given out to guests at a funeral wake.