But there were times when even this routine did not bring him peace of mind. And then he would inspect the cartridge belts and cartridge pouches, the canteens and the combat boots, and everywhere he looked, he found more faults. Then he would punish the whole company with hours of press-ups, and send them all on a low crawl from one end of that dusty field to the other, and if that wasn’t enough, he would cry, ‘March! March!’ And send them running up the Koçaş mountains. And the whole company would leave the training field holding their rifles crosswise and climb up to the middle of those grey-blue cliffs, and as they jumped like goats from rock to rock they kept looking over their shoulders, kept listening for the next instruction, but the lieutenant would just stand there, refusing to give the order to stop. And so the company would keep climbing up those burning rocks, following in the footsteps of the great mountain bandits, maybe, and when they were high enough up to be sure they were out of earshot, they sent a shower of curses raining down on that lieutenant. Donkey, son of a donkey, some said. Asshole, said others. Lowlife. Prick. And some lowed like cows, almost, letting out a string of curses, the veins in their neck bulging until they were thick as rolling pins. And sometime after all that, the lieutenant would give the order to stop, but, knowing that his voice would not carry that far up, he would have to face the cliff and flap his arms. And then the men would stop short, every one of them. As if they had actually heard him bark, ‘About turn! March!’ And down they would go, jumping from rock to rock as fast as their legs could carry them. As he watched them coming down, their bodies spent and steaming, their great tongues hanging, and their faces almost lost inside the clouds of their own breath, the lieutenant would permit himself a happy smile. And then he would resume his stroll around the edges of the training ground, nodding now and again in agreement with his invisible companion, stopping here and there to kick a few soldiers. But not because they’d done anything wrong. It was almost as if he kicked them so as to understand why he did so.
Once, while attacking an imaginary target with his bayonet, Ziya let his eyes slide away from it, and for this the lieutenant punched him. This happened on the seventh day of training, and they were lined up across the field, and thrusting their bayonets into the gut of the body they had been instructed to see in the emptiness before them, and when they jumped back, they made sure to twist their weapons in that gut, as they had been taught to do, to ensure that the wound was deadly. The lieutenant was far away just then, a lofty ghost, lost to his own thoughts. But then, it was like he’d been teleported. Suddenly he was there, next to Ziya, to punch him. ‘Look the enemy in the face, you stupid ox!’ he screamed. ‘Look the enemy in the face!’ When he was gone, the stub-nosed sergeant came over and in a gentle voice, he tried to comfort him. ‘Let it go, Baba,’ he said. ‘Grit your teeth and let it go.’ But his words were no comfort. For the rest of the day, Ziya hung his head, disgraced. He couldn’t even look at Kenan. When they spoke, he averted his eyes. It was as if he could still hear the punch ringing in his ears. All day long, they burned. The sergeant must have been watching him from a distance, because after supper, when Ziya was sitting under the almond trees, he came to talk to him again. Crouching down, and putting a gentle, brotherly hand on his shoulder, he tried to comfort him again. ‘You’re not still thinking about that business, are you? Let it go, my boy. Put it out of your mind.’
He was an interesting man, this sergeant — everything he did was exactly as the regulations stipulated, but he never got mixed up in any of those stupid games. If they were on the training ground, advancing with the bayonets, on an army of imaginary enemies, and he saw the men were tired, for example, he would cry out, ‘Air raid! Air raid! Down!’ And at once the men would throw themselves on to the ground, face down. And as he went around doing his inspection, the sergeant would whisper to the men on the ground. ‘Go on then,’ he would say, in a voice full of kindness. ‘Get some rest while the lieutenant’s back is turned.’ And then he would continue on his way, making as if to check each and every one of them, but actually telling them a few dirty jokes, and after that he would say, ‘And let this be a lesson to you, when you’re breaking a rule, and you want to make sure no one notices, there is no better way than this. And that’s my advice to you. Wherever you go in life, make sure to lie low, because if you don’t, that fat-assed, many-headed jailer we call society will burn you good.’ And sometimes, when he made the whole company sit down, while one of their number read from the United Infantry Manual, known to them as the ST 7-10B, he would suddenly lift up his hand to silence him, and, looking dreamily into the distance, this sergeant would mumble, ‘Did you know you had an aunt, waiting for me to return to Izmir Karşıyaka?’ And then he would nod at the rifle sitting next to him, and say, ‘As soon as I’m rid of this murderous thingumajig they call the G-3 infantry rifle, I’m going to marry that aunt of yours.’ And then he’d take a long, deep breath.
And that breath of his was so deep that it almost seemed to pull the sea itself away from Izmir Karşıyaka, and with the sea, the seagulls’ cries. And then, at the foot of the Koçaş mountains, they would see sparkling blue white-tipped waves, and passing over these waves they would see vessels of all colours, chugging happily back and forth. And then, they would see her, see her so very clearly. Waiting beneath the palm trees, stepping away from the crowd on the pier, or sitting at the back of a hooded horse carriage, looking at the flowers. What a beauty she was, this girl. She would lean forward, to look out over the Silvan training ground, but the sergeant was the only one who saw her. He would breathe in deep again, at the sight of her, and then he would begin to speak, tripping over his words as if that might make his military service end sooner. ‘We’re a rocket-launcher company, my friends. So let’s see who can tell me what a rocket launcher launches.’