On his nineteenth day at the border, Ziya heard his third call floating in from Syria. It was Hayrullah of Denizli District, Adana, standing next to him that night; several hours in, they dipped into their parka pockets and took out the dry bread they’d brought with them, and after they had finished it, they went out on patrol, each in their own direction. The air had cooled somewhat, so Ziya had pulled his cap down over his ears, and he was treading softly down the dirt track that quivered before him like a piece of white gauze. All he could see on the Turkish side was a darkness so thick it almost pressed against his face; on the Syrian side, on a gentle hill some seven or eight kilometres away, there were the lights of a small village. And so it was while Ziya was gazing over at those lights that he heard what sounded like a soft moan, rising from the darkness beyond the railroad. ‘Whooooop!’ And with that, Ziya turned on his heels, to race back to the trench. And there, rushing in from the other side, holding his rifle crossways, was Hayrullah, and even though his face was half-obscured by darkness, you could see that he was shaking, quaking; throwing himself into the trench like some sort of sack, and struggling to catch his breath, he gasped, ‘Did you hear it?’
‘I heard it,’ Ziya whispered.
They swung their rifles forward, and now it was their barrels looking out like two eyes over the dark minefield; with bated breath, they put their fingers on their triggers. Then suddenly they could see a tangled flock of shadows landing on the railroad, until, one by one, they moved into the minefield, rising and falling, crackling the dry grass beneath their feet. And then Hayrullah pressed the trigger, and then Ziya did, too: hearing gunfire, a few of the shadows turned around, whinnying in pain as they went. There was then a violent scuffle, as several shadows broke away from the flock; a few of them shot back at the trench: one shadow with a great load on its back lost its balance and fell on to its knees, but at the very moment as it pulled itself back up to the level of the asphalt road, it vanished. And with a speed that seemed to verge on the impossible, the shadows coming up behind it vanished, too. Hayrullah and Ziya fired a few more shots in their direction, and into the rustling grass, and then, trembling with fear and excitement, they waited. And as they did so, the night slowly expanded; as it lapped against the old border, it grew thicker, too. Seeing that the danger was over, Hayrullah muttered, ‘We got off lightly this time, thank God,’ but his eyes were still fixed on the border. ‘Did you see them? Those were bales of tea on those horses’ backs, and there were seven or eight people, at least.’
‘So we’ve fended off a plot to bring down the national economy — is that what you’re saying?’ asked Ziya in a mocking voice.
Hayrullah said nothing, but he lifted up his head, just a little. His eyes were still on the rustling grass and the railroad.
And for a time Ziya fell silent. ‘Dear God,’ he said to himself. ‘I hope none of those shadows were hit. Dear God, I hope not. I hope none of them were hit. Dear God!’
At daybreak, the sergeant came back, bringing with him the soldiers from the other stations, and they all went out to the barbed wire to look at the field. There were, as far as they could see, no dead or wounded, and neither had they left anything behind. There were tracks about the width of five ploughs coming on to the field, and just a bit of the way in, long before they reached the other side, they looped away in all directions. Later on, the commander arrived in a cloud of dust to inspect the area where the incident had taken place. Stepping down from his jeep, he put his hands on his hips and took a good long look at the field.
‘So now,’ he said to Hayrullah. ‘Tell me what happened.’
Hayrullah gave a blow-by-blow account of what had happened, but of course he left out the whoop.
The commander left it there, asking no questions, and he didn’t so much as look at Ziya. He just stood there staring at his glistening, freshly shined combat boots, and listening to what Hayrullah had to say. Then he marched sternly back to his jeep, and climbed in.
Back at the outpost, they took a statement, and instead of saying that they had used forty-seven bullets back in the trench, it said they had used a hundred and forty-seven. This was because they were all short of bullets, and that was because the soldiers sometimes fired their rifles indiscriminately as time went on, sometimes just out of exasperation, and sometimes because they were about to be discharged and wanted to make sure nothing went wrong at the last moment. Some had used most of their bullets on the mosquitoes. Especially when the State Battery Farm put on its water sprinklers, those mosquitoes came out in force, and when they did, it felt as if there were dozens of lice crawling over the men’s groins and armpits and down the seams of their uniform. The mosquitoes came swarming in like clouds. All night long, they’d buzz annoyingly around their heads, and by morning their hands and faces would be covered with bites. If a driver was going to Viranşehir for provisions and ammunition, there were even those who begged him to bring them back plastic bags to put over their hands and heads while on guard duty. This, too, had its drawbacks, because if you were breathing inside a plastic bag, you misted it up, and so you had to keep reaching in to rub off the condensation, and when you did that, you dislodged the elastic band that kept the plastic bags on your hands. And that was when some soldiers lost their patience and tore those plastic bags off their heads, upon which the mosquitoes that had been sitting on their rifles rose up in clouds and zeroed in on them.
And this was why the extra hundred bullets that they included in their statement that day was not enough to meet the deficit at Seyrantepe Station. So from time to time, in an arrangement with the other stations in the area, they put flash suppressors down a few barrels to make those rifles sound like Kalashnikovs, and in the space of three weeks, they staged two fake skirmishes, claiming afterwards that it was thanks to their quick response that they had been able to drive back a group of smugglers who had been trying to sneak across the border with their horses, and when they went back to the station to make their statements, they claimed to have used far more bullets than could fit into a pouch.
Because they were new, the sergeant took Kenan and Ziya aside to issue a stern warning. ‘If you say a word about this to anyone, I’ll make sure you suffer,’ he said.
They both promised to say nothing.
They were, in any event, living in a daze, out there on the border, and in no shape to think about such things. Kenan was having nightmares, every time he lay down to sleep. He would wake up in a sweat at noon each day, and sit up on his bunk to scratch himself, and then he would tiptoe over to the door, trying not to wake anyone as he went, and then he would flit outside, like a shadow. Ziya would find him sitting under the almond tree, next to the graves, his face all screwed up and on the verge of tears. And then he would crouch down gently on the grass next to him, of course, and the two of them would stay there for a long time, gazing out at the border and the railroad and the lands of Syria beyond it. Sometimes, when they were sitting out there, they’d see the battered carriages of the Toros Express rolling down the tracks, and it was almost as if it was afraid to break the hush reigning over that border, because it wouldn’t sound its whistle even once, as it slithered across the earth like a dusty old snake towards Ceylanpınar or Gaziantep. As it faded into the skyline, the silence it left behind was hard to bear, and so, too, was the naked earth that filled it. And that was when Kenan would go pale, and let his shoulders sink a little lower. And he would get up suddenly, and leave Ziya where he was, and go behind the station to write his fiancée a letter. Or he would stay where he was, and take a deep breath, and say, ‘This really is the land that God fucked over. Just look at it. We don’t even have a little shop where we can go to buy matches.’