‘No! Impossible!’ said Ziya. The jeep was bobbing around so much that his voice sounded strangely thin. ‘Nothing like that’s going to happen. Don’t worry.’
Ahmet swung around to fix him with a stare.
‘You’re very naïve,’ he said then. ‘The commander’s sending you out in the jeep so that they kill you thinking it’s him. You haven’t joined up the dots yet, I see.’
‘The truth is, it never even occurred to me,’ Ziya murmured.
And as he did so, he shrank shivering into his seat. He was just straightening his rifle, which had slipped between his legs, when a gunshot rang through the night. First they couldn’t figure out what direction it was coming from. Stopping in the middle of the road, and turning off the searchlight and the headlights, they peered out into the night. When two flares went up near Boztepe Outpost, they turned around promptly. They barrelled down the road, passing the stations one by one, but there were no more gunshots, just a few faint whoops that made the black night blacker. Ahmet’s face was as rigid as if he were racing into the arms of death; he was pressing down on the accelerator as if to say, whatever shall be, shall be, but get it over with. As he drove he kept glancing with fearful eyes at the guards coming up to the side of the road. As they were racing past Ege Outpost in the direction of Boztepe, five panicky soldiers raised their arms in the air to get them to stop. With one voice they cried, Feyzullah has shot himself! Feyzullah has shot himself! And they raced towards the jeep, trailing their long shadows behind them. They followed them back to their post, of course, and there they found Feyzullah of Niğde, whose left arm had leaned on his gun fifteen minutes earlier and set off the trigger. Now he was lying dazed in a pool of blood. The hole in his arm was horribly large, and they had packed it with the lining from a parka, and to stop the bleeding they had tied his arm tightly with a strip of gauze, just above his elbow. Then they picked up Feyzullah and held him in their arms; and even though he protested, saying leave me here, I want to die, in a quivering little moan, they put him into the jeep and then they sent him on to Urfa. A week later, Mustafa of Yozgat, serving at Yıldıran Outpost, shot himself in the foot. They picked him up out of the grass and carried him weeping tears the size of chickpeas, and sent him off to Urfa, too. Reports were made of both incidents, of course, and statements taken from both men, after which Feyzullah of Niğde and Mustafa of Yozgat were both charged with acting in a manner unfit for the army.
After seeing what happened to those two soldiers, Ziya gave himself over heart and soul to his poison. It was no longer enough just to drink in the canteen: he’d have Resul prepare him another bottle, which he would hide inside his parka and take out with him on night patrol. Because he expected to die at any minute and did not wish to arrive in the next world drunk, Ahmet of Polatlı refused to touch the stuff. He spent his nights with his fearful eyes on those guards who stood like ghosts on the roadside, with their rifles slung over their shoulders, and he spent his days circling the water pump, staring at the ground and speaking to no one. And every so often he would get into the jeep that stood next to the flagpole and just sit there, for hours on end. But all the while, he would keep glancing left and right, grimacing as anxiously as if he were on night patrol already, while bullets rained down on him. Whenever Ziya looked up from his typewriter, he would see him in that jeep. So when the day came that he did not see him there, he waited at first, thinking he might have gone to the toilet, and then he got up from his desk a few times to lean out the window and look around. And then Resul came rushing into the office. Twice he lunged forward, as if he was trying to ram a door, as in a panicked voice he cried, ‘Ahmet’s crossed over. By God, he’s crossed over!’
‘What do you mean, he’s crossed over?’
‘Crossed over to Syria! I saw it with my own eyes!’
‘We can’t let the commander find out,’ said Ziya, jumping up. ‘Come on now. Come with me.’ By the time he and Resul had gone through the barbed-wire fence, and crossed the tracks, and passed the well and come to the end of the mud-brick houses, they looked across the ploughed fields spraying gold dust in the midday sun and saw Ahmet racing into the depths of Syria. They caught up with him, breathless, at the entrance to a little treeless village. ‘We beg you,’ they implored. ‘Don’t fail your military service!’ Taking him by the arm, they dragged him back. Creeping silently around the rear of the company building to keep the commander from seeing, they took him into the office, but Ahmet was still struggling to free himself from their grasp. That was why, after they’d put him into a chair, they sat down next to him, one on each side, and tried to console him, as well as calm him down. ‘Would you like a little poison?’ they asked. ‘Shall we bring some up?’ But Ahmet wouldn’t answer this question; for five minutes, he remained silent, head bowed, and then he took a very deep breath and broke into sobs.
The commander had woken up by now and was standing in the door of the room next to the guardhouse, looking very drowsy. Next to the flagpole, a soldier was shaving the head of another soldier who was crouching on the ground. He didn’t seem to be doing it quite right, because the soldier who was crouching on the ground kept turning around, white-eyed, to offer suggestions. Sometimes he fluttered his fingers back and forth in the air, to show him how it should be done. The other soldier would lean over and watch carefully from above, and nod. Just then, an open-topped jeep rolled in past the soldiers who had queued up in front of the toilet with their water cans, waiting for their turn to wash. In a cloud of dust, it wheeled to the right to come to a halt five paces in front of the commander. Out jumped a flushed, narrow-shouldered, humpbacked weed of a sergeant. As he loped over to the commander, it looked as if the wind was blowing him. His head bobbing, he began to tell the commander something with feverish intensity, pointing into the distance as he did so. And the commander stood there listening, still as a statue. Then he put his hands on his hips and for a time gazed down at the ground in silence. The sergeant fell silent, too. He stood with his hands at his sides, and his head bent. Then suddenly the commander raised his head, turned towards the office, and waved to Ziya to come straight over.
Ziya left Resul in the office with the sobbing Ahmet and rushed over.
‘The clerk in the next company was shot in a skirmish last night,’ said the commander. ‘You are to go over there and show someone who can type how to prepare the report. They’ll bring you back tomorrow. So now jump into that jeep!’
‘Yes, sir!’ said Ziya.
And then he climbed into the back of the jeep and sat down on a black leather seat that was caked with dust. The sergeant piled in after him, looking very much like one of those stick figures in the sketches he did of incidents. With that they were off, and, tracked by clouds of dust, they sped down the road for six or seven hundred metres, and into the territory of the Yıldıran Outpost, and on they went, racing towards the horizon in silence. For about an hour, they watched yellow waves ripple across the empty sun-baked hills, as the minefield on their left grew thicker and then thinner, while on their right they passed one observation tower after another, and trenches that looked like open graves. At regular intervals, they also passed the grey prefabricated guardhouses perched on their hilltops like forgotten boxes. And then there were the waves of desolation, and the silences, and the things that seeped into those silences — the rustling of grass and the deep-blue skies — until at last they had arrived at company headquarters.