His words plunged them into silence. And then they got up to return, bewildered, to their work, of course. With long faces they picked up more stones, and carried them out in single file.
Two days later the waif-like sergeant rushed over. ‘Put down your stones! Put down your stones!’ he said to the boys from Silvan. And he took them to the front of the main building. This time he ordered them to line up two by two, and there they waited motionless in the sun for twenty-five, thirty minutes. Finally a grim and fleshy sergeant major came outside; standing on the steps, he produced a piece of paper, and in a voice that sounded as if he had swallowed a microphone, he boomed, ‘Now listen to me carefully. I am going to read out the names of those who are to be sent to Suruç Company. You should step out of line if you hear your name and wait over there’. This sergeant major went on to read out the names of those to be sent to Akçakale and Viranşehir. When he had finished reading out the names, he rolled up the paper, and after giving his thigh a few nervous slaps, he said, ‘If you get a move on, you can make it to your companies by evening, so get going, now.’ With that, he hurried back into the building.
They piled out of the gendarmerie in confusion, and after asking anyone they met for directions to the bus station, they set off for the city centre. Once they were there, they plunged into the crowd, and here they were obliged to divide up into three groups. And each group went off in a different direction, to wander amongst the buses and minibuses on the bays. Kenan and Ziya and a few of their friends headed first for the Viranşehir minibus. After the driver dozing at the wheel had told them what time he’d be leaving, they went together to the coffeehouse at the other end of the station, where they sat themselves down on its low straw chairs and drank a glass of tea each.
‘For a moment there, I was afraid they’d send us to different companies,’ said Kenan. ‘I’m glad we’ve both ended up with Viranşehir.’
Ziya gave him a little nod. He tried to accompany it with a smile, but he just couldn’t manage it. He fixed his eyes on the tea glass before him and for a while he stayed very still, while he thought about the convicts’ terrifying stories.
‘We’ve landed in the same place, but our future is dark,’ he said, as he pushed his tea glass aside with the back of his hand. ‘God only knows what we can do.’
Kenan said nothing. He stared fearfully into the tea glass in his cupped hands.
Then they jumped up, fearing that they might have missed the bus. They rushed past the prayer-bead vendors and the rainbows they sent clicking around them. They wended their way amongst the sucuk vendors and lahmacun vendors, and through the clouds of sweat and smoke until they had reached the clapped-out minibus that would be taking them to Viranşehir. The other passengers had not yet arrived, and the driver was no longer at the wheel. There were patches of putty on the sides of the minibus. It looked like it had been sitting there, inert, for many thousands of years. Not knowing what else to do, Kenan and Ziya went to wait in the shade of a wall. Neither wanted to speak. They just stood there grimly, thinking about the stories the convicts had told them. They could still hear all the horrors that had echoes through the darkness of those stories: the bloodcurdling cries cutting through the hiss of gunfire, the whinnying horses, rearing up on their hind legs, and explosions. And each time they did so, the two men would cast their eyes to the ground in silence, and take a deep breath.
It was hot as the fire Nimrod built to burn the Prophet Abraham.
And then the shoeshine boy came up to them, his case swinging from his shoulder. Stopping two paces in front of them, he said, ‘Should I give them a shine, brother soldier?’
At first neither of them heard the boy.
That’s why they both looked down, as if their boots were speaking. ‘Should I give them a shine, brother soldier?’ the boy asked again.
‘Go away, son. Go away. We’re from faraway towns. If a crow squawks around here, we jump,’ said Kenan. Looking as if he were about to cry, Kenan flapped his arms, as if to shoo away a chicken.
The boy turned away at once, and soon he and the case on his shoulder had vanished into the crowd.
No sooner had he done so than the passengers appeared. They rushed in from all directions, their baggy trousers flapping, and piled into the minibus.
When they reached the Viranşehir Company, it was still as hot as it had been in Urfa: the single-storey prefabricated building lined up on that great plain sizzled and swayed as if they’d been thrown into a flaming vat of oil. Sitting in the sun on the sandy field between the buildings was a two-wheeled water tanker; some soldiers had gathered around it and were taking turns drinking from the tap. First the new arrivals went up to these gasping soldiers, whose lips and tongues were parched from the heat, and asked where they should go. Pointed in the right direction, they raced across the field, and one by one they printed out and signed their names on a paper that burned to the touch. But after that, no one paid them the least attention. No one told them what to do, or what not to do. And so they waited with those who had come before them, wondering if they were being punished, wondering what they had done. For days and days they waited in the sun. Finally, on the thirteenth day, a sergeant lined them up. After pacing from one end of the line to the other, he asked, ‘Does anyone here know how to type?’
‘I do,’ said Ziya.
They waited for the sergeant to ask if there were any tailors amongst them, or barbers, or anything else he might wish to know, but that was it. ‘Come with me, then,’ he said, and he took Ziya off to the building next to the mess hall. He took him into Room S-1, which was tiny, and filled with metal cabinets, sat him down in front of a typewriter and gave him a typing sample. Trying not to show his excitement at being spared the watchtower on the border, Ziya typed up the sample, pulled it out, and handed it to the sergeant who was waiting beside him. The sergeant gave it a long inspection, searching for mistakes. Then he said, ‘Fine, you’re the person we’re looking for. Congratulations. You’ll be the company’s S-1 clerk.’
Ziya did not get up from the typewriter once that day. He carried on typing the documents the sergeant gave him, and that was why he did not see Kenan again until he walked into the dimly lit mess hall that evening. All day he’d been elated at the thought of being spared the watchtower on the border, but when he went over to Kenan’s table and sat down across from him, he suddenly felt ashamed, as if he’d done something wrong. He felt so ashamed that he hardly knew how to hold himself, or where to look, or what to say.
‘Come on now. Congratulations. You’ve managed to escape, at least,’ Kenan said, as he made an effort to smile.
Ziya’s face burned.
‘It’s just luck,’ he said quietly.
The next morning he raced off to his typewriter as soon as he had finished breakfast. He opened the window, picked up a cloth and dusted off the desk, and gladly went to work. Twenty-five or thirty minutes later, the sergeant arrived, and he was very happy to see Ziya there typing away, of course. Then he sat down on one of the chairs lining the wall, threw one leg over the other, and, without so much as a good morning, he asked, ‘How old are you?’ And Ziya told him he was twenty and a half years old. He said this without pausing to think or make a calculation, and neither did he give any indication of an ulterior motive: he simply said the first words that came into his head, as if he were breathing them. And the sergeant burst out laughing. He laughed so much he almost burst his sides. So he got up. Clutching his belly, he spun around, and his belly swayed this way and that. He went out the door, still laughing. ‘So he’s twenty and a half, ha, ha. He’s twenty and a half. Ha, ha!’ Ziya sat there stunned, as he listened to the laughter bouncing down the corridor. He was still sitting there when the sergeant returned, throwing open the door. Then, as he left again, he threw back his head, as his mouth lost its shape. Ziya listened to the laughter. Ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha. Then suddenly he was back with two other sergeants, and as he laughed, he kept pointing at Ziya, now with one hand, and now with the other, as if he were watching a naughty monkey at a zoo. As if he were reporting some sort of miracle. Ask him yourself, he said. He really is twenty and a half. Twenty and a half! That’s how old he is! While all this was going on, Ziya tried to keep his cool, but he couldn’t quite manage it. And before long he was lost in confusion.