Just then, there was a crackle of gunfire to the west of Seyrantepe. Serdar and Ziya both jumped, turning to look in the direction of the gunfire. As they did so, they heard some angry Kalashnikovs joining in with their G-3 infantry rifles, and suddenly there were hundreds of bullets flying through the night. Amid all this gunfire, they could hear whinnying horses racing in all directions, and also shrieks, each one different than the one before, and each one more desperate.
‘I can’t be sure,’ said Serdar. ‘But that sounded like a herd of sheep. If that’s what it was, this is going to turn out badly. Very badly.’
They stuck their heads out of the trench, both of them, to look anxiously in the direction of the skirmish. They were still shooting up tracers from time to time: they would go up and up, drawing a thin red line across the night sky, and then, very suddenly, they would vanish.
‘Shouldn’t we go over there to help them?’ asked Ziya in a trembling voice.
‘Haven’t you learned anything in the past three months?’ said Serdar, strengthening his hold on his rifle. ‘It’s a crime to leave your station. They’ll have seen the tracers. Don’t worry — they’ll be out there with reinforcements soon enough. And anyway. What if the smugglers are making all that noise to the west, just so that they could box us in over there, and pass over to the east?’
‘You’re right,’ murmured Ziya.
And there they stayed till morning, trying to protect their territory, and watching the fire-fight to the west with growing trepidation. Whenever there was gunfire, the jeeps and trucks in the field behind them would sweep the night with their searchlights, of course. Later on, a truckload of soldiers from Viranşehir joined them, together with two panzer tanks, but in the end it was not possible to stop this flock of sheep crossing like a flood of dirty wool from Turkey into Syria. As soon as there was light in the sky, they went pouring out of border control and the stations to look over to the place where the skirmish had happened. The scene that met their eyes was heart-wrenching: seventy sheep in all, lying dead on the dirt path, and in no man’s land, and the minefield, and the railroad. There were wounded sheep amongst them, legs twitching as they took their last breaths. Two or three paces from the barbed wire, lying amongst the empty shells, were two horses whose bellies were riddled with bullet holes, and two men lying side by side. They were both wearing black shalwar trousers, and their scarves had been pulled off their heads. It had been Hayati of Acıpayam and Veysel Hoca in the trench just in front of them; Veysel Hoca was leaning on the wall, motionless and staring up at the sky, and letting out a light moan now and then, but it was Hayati, curled around his rifle, who’d been hit in his chest, and he had been dead for some time.
Veysel Hoca had been hit in the shoulder, and when the soldiers from the company came to collect him, they lifted him up much too roughly. They put him into an open jeep and took him to Urfa to be examined.
All the soldiers came running in from the Seyrantepe stations, wanting to see Hayati, and no one more than Osman of Selçuk, but the sergeant opened his arms to keep them from getting too close. In an anguished, ropy voice, he said, ‘Stand back, my friends. I beg of you, stand back.’ At these words, the men stood back, and there they waited, in tears. The only one who went in to look at Hayati close up was the commander; kneeling next to his head, he straightened Hayati’s cap, and then he bent down, so that the men wouldn’t see him cry.
And while he cried, Kenan was standing still next to Ziya, tears brimming in his eyes.
‘Do you know what?’ he said. ‘None of this seems real.’
‘Not to me, either,’ Ziya said.
Then he turned around and looked at the two horses lying on the other side of the barbed wire, and the two men in shalwar trousers lying next to them. A soldier from the company was standing guard, with his rifle held crossways, but he had his back to them, and was looking at Hayati.
Later on that day, before Hayati departed for the village of Acıpayam in Denizli in his flag-covered coffin, the commander reassigned most of the men at Seyrantepe Station, sending some to Yıldıran and Mezartepe, and others to Boztepe, and quite a large number to Telhamut, but Ziya was not amongst them. That was why, when the rest of them loaded their belongings on to the back of the truck and climbed in after them, it was only the two of them standing there, Ziya and the sergeant. And once the truck was out of sight, they walked over to the two unclaimed soldiers lying there in their graves; as flashes of light spun out from the mirror that was hanging from the branch of the almond tree, they stood side by side in the grass and looked down at the border, and at the station where Hayati had given his life.
‘After the truck drops off all your friends, it will drop other soldiers off here,’ said the sergeant, in a voice so low he was almost speaking to himself. ‘And also, the commander is moving me to Yıldıran Outpost, so as soon as this other sergeant comes to replace me, I’ll be leaving.’
‘So why did he leave me here?’ Ziya asked.
‘You’re going back to Ceylanpınar, to work with the clerk,’ the sergeant told him. ‘That’s what the commander said.’
And so it was that Ziya climbed up into the passenger seat of a small truck that came for him that evening, and returned to the big, grey building in Ceylanpınar; his first stop was the munitions depot, where he turned in his rifle, his canteen, his cartridge box, his charger and his bullets. The next morning, he sat down in front of a typewriter on the second floor, so that the humpbacked clerk who was to be discharged three weeks later could teach him which document was to be drawn up when, and how.
Everything had changed so fast: for him at least, the grinding hell of life on the border had suddenly given way to a story to be lived through documents on a desk. And even more important, he was the one who was shaping this story: he would wake up early to take the reports coming in from the outposts by phone; if there’d been an incident, he would take down the names of the guards who had given a rough account to their sergeants and determine how many bullets they had used, and then he would sit down at the table and roll some yellow onion skin into that creaking typewriter and begin typing at once. At such and such a time, gendarme X and gendarme Y, who were standing guard in such and such a station, under the command of such and such an outpost, itself under the command of this company, spotted intruders passing over from Syria to Turkey, and after warning them three times, and telling them to stop, the intruders answered with gunfire, whereupon a skirmish started, of which the outcome was as follows. . this was how these stories went, making no mention of the well water, or the lice, or the wooden outhouse, or the water they had to scoop up with a tin can and pour over their heads when trying to wash themselves, or the mosquitoes, or the pieces of bread they ate in the middle of the night, in their trenches, or the letters they sent home, never knowing if they got there, or the fear, or the melancholy, or the flavourless food. Not a mention of any of this, of course. After completing a summary report that left out even the shadow of the truth, the time came to sketch out the incident itself. First he would draw a double line down the full length of the page, to indicate the route of the railroad that divided Turkey from Syria. Then he would draw another line and mark it with crosses at intervals to indicate the barbed-wire fence, and next to that he would indicate the sand track with a broken line, and in the empty space between this and the railroad he would write m i n e f i e l d, taking care to leave spaces between the letters. And if any smugglers had died in the skirmish, they were shown as stick figures lying in this minefield, or the sand track. Sometimes he had to include dead horses and dead sheep and bales of tea in these sketches. But if, say, ten bales of tea had been seized, only two or three or four would be surrendered to customs; the rest would most certainly be distributed to the guardhouses so that the soldiers could have their fill of tea. This was why Ziya almost never had to sketch in those little tea chests. And this was how he finished off those documents, which he would then put into their dossier, and take down to the commander’s office, to have them signed.