Hasan Toptas - Reckless

The air began to cool.

Feeling its caress on his skin, Ziya’s first thought was to stand up, get dressed, wash his hands and face. But he couldn’t get his body to obey him. There was still that strange weight pressing down on him, just like in the dream. And that was why he just sat there for about ten or fifteen minutes, head bowed, and perfectly still. Then he thought about the dream he’d just come out of. He thought about Binnaz Hanım, and what she’d said. And though he could still hear the flow of her lament, he found his way through her words, and then a little way beyond them, to think about Kader, about the bookshop where he and Kader had spent so many long days, and about the small town where he’d spent his childhood. He imagined himself on a bicycle festooned with pinwheels and brightly coloured banners, and nylon ribbons flying in the wind. But while he was pedalling through the streets of his childhood, his mind slipped away, very suddenly, to the Syrian border. And then, just as suddenly, a shaft of light slipped in, and all at once there was the scent of oranges. The crunch of pomegranates. And there, stretched out before him, was an endless expanse of sun-scorched earth. Hill after parched hill, parading before his eyes. On each was a prefabricated guardhouse. Long tangles of barbed wire. Black-mouthed trenches. And watchtowers, screaming with rust as they stretched up into the sky. Knowing what he would find there, Ziya tried to turn his thoughts to something else, but it didn’t work. The Syrian border would not budge, not by a single millimetre. That field at the far edge of the Harran Plain swooped in so fast as to strike at the very heart of darkness, glowing yellow, restless and stripped bare. In its wake came the ribbons of red smoke, and the hum that turned into a roar, and the torrent of images, flowing fast and faster, but making no sense. The honking horns of the city he could now see: the hulking nightmare sitting at the edge of the minefield, sparkling with lies. And then, as if that weren’t enough, the bird from the dream flew in from who knows where. And just like in the dream it flapped about furiously, as if to take in its surroundings, lighting on the tip of a watchtower and peering down, as if to inspect it more closely, whereupon the bird began to drift gently through the scent of oranges into Ziya’s mind, but only for a moment. Only until the bird had settled on the roof of a guardhouse.

The bird fixed its beady eyes on the gravestones just beneath. It ruffled its wings, whirring like an aeroplane, but never taking off. Instead it settled itself in, and, pulling in its neck, began to coo. Over and over, hoarse and shrill, it called out to Syria, and Ziya could just about see the waves of sound, rippling outwards like smoke. It was almost as if this bird was saying something to these lands rendered alien by barbed wire. Or maybe it was just a sound, travelling from one side to the other. But now the bird was slowly turning towards the soldiers drawing water from the well in front of the guardhouse. None of the soldiers around the well had noticed the bird yet. They did not speak as they lowered the bucket, filled the bucket in the din of croaking frogs, and brought the bucket up again, poured the water into twenty-kilo canisters, and climbed down off the concrete platform to walk wearily into the distance in single file. They didn’t just look weary, these soldiers: they looked vacant, and painfully so. They were drained of all life. As if their souls were elsewhere, as if their bodies were passing the guardhouse of their own accord. As they went on their way, they tilted ever more precariously in the direction of their cannisters, and this gave them a curious sort of shuffle. Because of this shuffle, their clapped-out combat boots left little clouds of dust like baby’s breath in their wake.

Soon there were only two soldiers left at the well. One was very dark and skinny. As he pulled up the bucket, he seemed to bend over double, his legs quivering like two branches fading green. The harder he pulled, the more he puffed up his sweaty cheeks, which glistened like balloons in the hot sun.

Just then, the soldier caught sight of the pigeon.

He saw it by chance, while he was straightening out the rope. With a quick nod he pointed it out to his companion.

And that was when the bird locked eyes with Ziya. Ziya rose from his bed at once, groping his way to the window. First, of course, he passed the yard to the left of the guardhouse. Here the soldiers were trying to boil their water. Their sooty canisters stood steaming on top of their piles of stones. Clouds billowed above them, parting now and again to offer Ziya glimpses of the soldiers as he walked on to the edge of the minefield, and into the city streets that spread out as far as the patrol paths of the rear lines. Just then he saw the bookshop they’d spent so much time in. Its window was full of newly published books, but he didn’t stop; instead, willing himself desperately forward, he weaved his way through the chattering car horns, and pressed on to the skyscrapers. Cutting through this district, he kept on, past parking lots with their rows of insect cars, past the great markets lit by many thousands of lights, each one piercing the darkness with an unmatched power. Past viaducts, and past anonymous warehouses. Through a dark neighbourhood ruled by automobile repair shops and scrap-metal dealerships and into the back streets, deeper into the city and then deeper still, until he felt as lost as a distant, fleeting shadow in a shop window. It would be more accurate to say, though, that a moment arrived when he thought he truly was lost. And it was at this precise moment that he saw the deserted streets of his hometown looming up behind the watchtowers, and so this was where Ziya now headed.

He was no longer agitated: after walking through such chaos, it calmed him to see these white one- and two-storey houses, those woods rising above them to the left. With every step, the scent of orange groves seeping into that calm grew stronger, and so, too, did the cries of the seagulls circling in the sky above, the red, red crunch of pomegranates, and the clatter of horse carriages rolling over cobblestones. And the crunch of insects, which began to sparkle at that moment like shattered glass. By then Ziya had reached the historic fountain, the one with all those ancient words scrawled over it, and he was turning right into the town’s central square. He walked on slowly, looking this way and that, stopping some distance from the shops that lined the square. When he was a child, he’d bought his sweets in these tiny little shops. And his balloons, and his chickpeas, from shops that seemed now to be no larger than ice chests. There were a few — just a few — people going in and out, carrying paper bags and straw baskets. And in the square, in the shade of the great rustling plane tree, he could still see Ali the Snowman amongst the children. He had taken the saddlebag off his horse’s back, and now he was trying, with some effort, to roll one of his snow wheels on to a table covered in oilcloth. As he rolled it with his purple hands, the snow began to melt, dripping down the sides of the oilcloth. When this water reached the ground, it turned into a cooling, freshening pool that began to flow towards the children’s feet. By now the snow press was spinning at the desired speed. Ali the Snowman glanced over at his handsaw. Picking it up, he began to hack at the snow wheel.

The children took one step closer to the snowflakes flying from the handsaw’s blade.

And then, very suddenly, one of them asked Ali the Snowman if he knew the location of the snow well up in the mountains. He asked this as if it was something this man kept secret.

Ali the Snowman gave no answer, of course. He muttered something to himself, in a husky voice that seemed as strange, and as purple, as his swollen hands.