A few hours before going out on guard duty, Kenan would join them; giving himself a good scratch, he would squat near the shelves and sip his glass of poison as slowly as if it were tea. He was no longer the person he once had been. For almost a year now, he’d been going out on guard duty in fear of death every night, and sitting in that trench until morning, with only a piece of bread in his pocket, and returning to the outpost only to sink into a nightmare, while lice and mosquitoes crawled all over him. This miserable routine and all the other indignities of his life had utterly crushed him. He tried to hide it, but his legs shook when he walked and even from a distance you could see how difficult it was for him to carry that rifle on his shoulder. That’s why they never gave him too much poison, even if he asked for it. And because they could not bring themselves to tell him why, they’d tried to turn it into a joke, saying, ‘Now why would you need more than that? You drink the stuff like tea!’ Kenan would turn away to stare at the path he’d soon be taking to the trench. He’d turn back from that hell he was already living, and try to smile. Then he would find an excuse to talk about his village, and in the little weedy voice he’d begin to describe its beauties, which by now had taken on a mythic aura. And as he spoke, his voice would grow stronger, and if a moment arrived when it was strong enough to conjure up a pasture of sun-dappled flowers, he would invite Resul and Ziya to come and see it with their own eyes. Biting his lower lip, and shaking his head in reverence, he would say, ‘Come and visit after we’re discharged, at any rate. You should see how beautiful it is, just once.’ And they would say, ‘We’ll do that. We promise.’ And Ziya in particular meant it. He had listened to Kenan speak about his village so many times that he had memorised its every detail, and those details were so large in his mind that he was sure that, even if he went there alone, he would know where to find them: the fountain and the coffeehouses, the dirt road that crossed the plain, the sheep pens and the tall poplars enclosing them, the vineyards and, just beyond them, the paths leading up into the red-pine forests. And that was why his cologne-fogged voice rang with such conviction, when he stared into his glass of poison and declared that even if Resul couldn’t make it, he would come to visit, no matter what it took. ‘I’m not dying without seeing it,’ he’d say each time. And Kenan would stand up, as happy as a child. Picking up his parka and his rifle, he’d say, ‘So wish me luck,’ and set off down the path, with his legs shaking.
But one evening he set off down that path and couldn’t hold himself up. Before he had taken ten steps, he collapsed on the ground. Ziya saw this through the canteen window, and even though he was well and truly drunk by then, he rushed out to his side. He and the sergeant pulled him up, took off his cartridge belt, opened up his shirt, and threw water on his face. Kenan began to wheeze, and his whole body was shaking, and it was burning hot, too, with some sort of fever.
‘He can’t go out there in this condition,’ said Ziya, looking the sergeant in the face. ‘What do you think?’
The sergeant seemed not to know what to think. He bowed his head.
In the days that followed, Ziya did what he could to cheer Kenan up. If he saw his friend’s spirits sinking, Ziya would say, ‘Look at you, you’re skin and bones, there’s almost nothing left of you; we’re not letting you drink any of this, from now on, it’s forbidden.’ Kenan accepted the ban Ziya imposed on him without argument. He just bowed his head. So now, when he came to the canteen to squat next to the shelves, he’d rub his aching knees and nibble on the biscuits Resul gave him.
Ziya, meanwhile, was drinking as much as ever, of course. And when he staggered back to the dormitory late each night, he fell asleep the moment his head hit the pillow. This is how he was able to escape the barbed wire and the trenches and the observation towers and the minefields and the guardhouses, and their nightly concert, and their numbing silences. And Telhamut’s nine mud-brick houses, and the dormitory in which he slept, as he slipped off like a leaf down a river to another world that carried the sour stink of cologne. And that was where he was one night, with only two months of his military service left to go, when an agitated Resul shook him awake.
‘Come on, man! Wake up. The commander’s waiting for you outside! Get yourself armed and get out there,’ he said.
Exhausted and still half asleep, Ziya looked around him. Then he jumped up and fastened his cartridge belt and ran outside with his rifle in his hands. He found the commander standing in the darkness with his hands on his hips, and looking rather pleased. To his right stood two watchmen holding their rifles crossways, and on his left stood Resul and Yusuf the cook.
‘And now we have our clerk,’ he said, as soon as he saw Ziya. ‘Come over here. Look. We’ve brought in a live smuggler.’
Ziya looked in the direction the commander was pointing, and there, tied with rope to the base of one of the columns at the front of the building, was a broad-shouldered man the size of a wrestler. He was wearing black shalwar trousers, this man, and a grey T-shirt that emphasised the thickness of his neck. From time to time he’d look up to stare straight in the commander’s eyes and then he’d begin to speak, as rapidly as a machine gun. He was speaking Arabic, so no one could understand a thing he said, of course, beyond the three names he kept repeating — Muhammed, Ali and Mensur. The commander narrowed his eyes as they darted between the soldiers and the man tied to the column, and from time to time he shook his head, as if to say, ‘Just look at what I managed to drag in.’
Then he turned to Resul. Pointing into the darkness in the direction of the mud-brick houses, he said, ‘Go and find someone over there who can translate for this animal.’
Resul rushed away, rifle in hand, and once he had loped across the barbed-wire fence there was no more to him than a pair of pounding feet.
‘Look here,’ the commander said to Ziya. ‘You’re the clerk so you should know. Has a smuggler ever been brought in alive on this border?’
‘I’ve never heard of one, sir,’ Ziya replied.
The commander fixed his eyes on the man tied to the column, shaking his head as vigorously as if he’d been the one to answer his question. Then Resul came out into the night again, huffing and puffing and bringing with him a middle-aged railroad worker. But he wasn’t good enough for the commander. He looked him over as if he was about to give him a thrashing, and then he said, ‘No, not this one. Go back and find the stationmaster. Tell him to come here at once!’
And so Resul went back and woke up the stationmaster, who quickly got dressed. Ten minutes later, he was standing breathlessly in front of the commander. Seeing him, the commander said, ‘Now that’s more like it,’ as if it were the man’s uniform that would enable him to translate the prisoner’s words correctly and in the right spirit. Then he pointed at the man tied to the column and in a menacing voice, he said, ‘Ask this bugger where he hid the goods he was trying to take over, and how many others he had with him.’
The captive’s face brightened when he saw that the stationmaster could speak Arabic, and his eyes shone like gold dust. When he was giving his answers, he almost forgot he was tied to the column and tried to stand up.
‘What is he saying?’ barked the commander.
‘He’s not a smuggler,’ said the stationmaster. ‘He says he’s a dervish, going by the name of Mensur.’
‘What the. .?’ the commander cried. ‘So he says he’s a dervish?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the stationmaster. ‘He says he’s a dervish. According to what he says, he left his village this evening to attend a wedding in another village. To sate his appetite and his mind, he says. But it was so dark that he mistook the lights of Telhamut for this village, and so he crossed over the border into Turkey without even knowing it.’