‘You’re overdoing it with this poison,’ said Resul. ‘If something goes wrong, there’s no going to the doctor, as you well know.’
‘No one said anything about doctors,’ said Ziya. ‘In the hell we’re in, there aren’t even army doctors. And I know that.’
The two fell silent. They stared sourly into their glasses, as if their fates were written in them. And as they did so, a breeze wafted in, a very light breeze that made them shudder, even as it soothed them with the scent of grass.
‘So tell me,’ said Resul, taking another sip from his glass. ‘Are you never going to say what happened in that company next to ours?’
‘There’s nothing to say,’ said Ziya wretchedly. ‘A giant millwheel, churning and churning. Mosquitoes buzzing in the background. Lice swarming. Guns going off everywhere. But cap or no cap, ambush or no ambush, that glorious millwheel keeps on grinding people up. .’
‘You’re right,’ said Resul. ‘That’s what it’s doing. It’s grinding us up.’
Again they fell silent. For half an hour, neither spoke. They just stared into the night. Every so often they could hear a whoop coming in from one of the nearer trenches to the east.
‘We’re turning into cologne,’ said Resul. ‘Inside and out.’
‘That’s fine with me,’ Ziya said softly.
Resul put his glass down on the dark concrete step.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not drinking any more of it.’
Ziya reached out for the bottle and balanced it between his legs. Just then, another whoop sailed in from the night, a strangled sort of moan. It didn’t come from the trenches to the east, though, and neither did it come from the trenches to the west. It seemed to come from the depths of Syria. Then a door swung open, very softly, in one of the mud-brick houses, releasing a fuzzy ball of bright yellow light. But now the door swung shut, taking the light with it, as the house sank back into the night.
‘Do you know what?’ said Ziya, turning to look at Resul. ‘I can’t really believe that what we’re living through here is really happening.’
‘When reality becomes too much to bear, it never does seem real,’ said Resul. ‘There’s nothing surprising about that.’
Ziya bowed his head, and for a time he didn’t move.
‘Look,’ he said, pointing into the darkness behind their building. ‘That’s supposed to be a minefield, right? Hundreds of horses, and hundreds of people, and thousands of sheep have passed through there since I’ve been here. And all in the thick of night. Feeling their way, in zigzags and circles. But in all that time, not a single mine has gone off. It’s as if even the minefield doesn’t really exist.’
‘How can you say that?’ Resul protested. ‘Maybe they got lucky. Or maybe the earth has taken all it was fated to take, and that’s why nothing’s exploded.’
Ziya retrieved the bottle from between his legs and poured some more into his almost empty glass.
‘That’s enough, I think,’ said Resul. ‘Your liver’s going to explode.’
‘Never mind,’ mumbled Ziya.
And he continued drinking, in the same way and at the same rate, but after a time he was no longer in control of his movements, and then, very suddenly, his head fell to his chest. ‘You drank too much, my friend,’ Resul whispered. Taking him by the arm, he led him down the stairs and straight into the dormitory. Here he helped him remove his clothes, and once he had him lying on his cot, he pulled his threadbare brown blanket over him.
‘Even the pine saplings aren’t true,’ said Ziya, waving his hand. ‘Every day I water them, but before the day is out, the ground is dry again. Not the next day, do you hear what I’m saying? The ground goes dry the very same day. Resul, my boy, are you listening?’
‘I’m listening,’ Resul replied, ‘but keep your voice down, so the commander doesn’t hear you.’
‘Let him hear me,’ Ziya said.
No sooner had he said that than he fell asleep.
The next day he watered the saplings, of course, and then went back out on patrol with Ahmet of Polatlı. Holding his rifle between his legs, he sat in the front seat and combed the darkness with his searchlight, as they drove from one end of their stretch of border to the other, and so the months passed, in a cloud of cologne. And when the commander went off to groom himself after work, never once did he take pity on Ziya, and say, ‘You’re tired. Take the night off and rest.’ Quite the opposite. If circumstances kept them from getting to a skirmish fast enough, if that jeep that was beginning to look like a miracle on wheels happened to break down, or if they returned to headquarters in the morning just a bit too early, he lost his temper, and then there was no end to the curses Ziya and Ahmet of Polatlı had to bear. They just had to take all this shit from him and keep their mouths shut. When the commander acted like this, and when he saw those piles of bodies and animal carcasses piled up in the night, Ziya drank even more of Resul’s poison. From time to time, when no one was looking, he drank it in the office and the dormitory. Ahmet of Polatlı still wouldn’t touch it: instead he spent his shifts peering darkly into the night, watching those guards as they came into view at the roadsides. Once Ziya tried to force the bottle on him — and perhaps this was his way of forcing away the fear inside him. They were in the Seyrantepe area at the time, passing close to the trench where Hayati of Acıpayam had been shot. Ziya was busy with his bottle just then, so the searchlight was off; the dirt road stretched out before them, shivering in the headlights, and the night rose up from both sides of the road to press down on them, heavy and dense.
‘Have a drop or two, why don’t you,’ Ziya said. ‘It will calm you down.’
‘I don’t want any,’ said Ahmet.
As he said this, he took his right hand off the wheel and pushed the bottle back.
‘You know best, I guess,’ Ziya murmured.
Just then a huge explosion ripped through the darkness ahead; and flares flew up into the night, one after the other, from several different points. And it was as if a silence from far away came crowding in on them, while the silence that had engulfed them only moments earlier went flying into the distance, and for just a few seconds, they continued this back and forth, many thousands of times over. And then they could hear a machine gun, howling and on fire, slicing through the night. Ahmet of Polatlı put his foot on the accelerator of course, and they shot off in the direction of the Mezartepe Outpost and the skirmish. Sweeping the night with their searchlight, faster and faster, their hearts in the throats. Whenever there was a lull in the gunfire, they could hear screaming. Loud, sometimes. At other times, more like moans. And now and again, in the time it would take to wag a tail, a horse would whinny. As they drew closer, a bullet from a Kalashnikov struck their rear-view mirror, and Ahmet stopped short; cutting off their searchlight and headlights, they hit the ground. The fire was not just coming from Syria: there were as many as seven or eight Kalashnikovs firing on the guards in those trenches from the Turkish side. Once they worked this out, Ziya and Ahmet decided that there was no point in hiding behind that jeep like two dumb squashes; so as bullets continued to fly across the road, they crawled into a shallow ditch; lying shoulder to shoulder, they pointed their rifles in the direction of the Kalashnikovs and began to fire.