‘Oh, Kenan,’ he said then. ‘Do you remember that dream you told me? There was a knock on the door one day, and there before you was yourself as an old man. But to think that the only place you’ve ever seen yourself as an old man was in your dreams. .’
And suddenly he raised his head. He looked around him. Because he could hear Hayati of Acıpayam calling to him again, from that outhouse behind Seyrantepe. Osmaaaan, my fine young man, how many months has it been since you last had roast meat? He could hear that voice floating over the graves, to lose itself amongst the waving grass and the thorn bushes. So for a time Ziya sat there, pricking up his ears in case the voice came back. As he sat there, he wondered if his mind might be playing tricks on him. Then, remembering the gravestone he’d seen the day Kenan died, he stood up and headed tensely towards the cemetery gate. As he walked, he kept turning his head, studying each gravestone, looking for Hayati’s name.
‘And just look at where we have to wash. In all honesty. Not even a dog would want to wash in there!’
Hearing Hayati’s voice again, Ziya stopped. Shivering, he looked around him.
‘If you had a speck of that shit they call money, do you think you’d be wasting away here in God’s desert, my fine young man? Osman, my fine young blade, are you there?’
He stopped in front of an old almond tree. It had dried up; its trunk was covered with honey-coloured sap. His eyes nearly fell out of their sockets, because there, on the gravestone before him, were the words: Private Hayati Bulut. The grave that should have been in Acıpayam, in Denizli, was here in front of him. Thinking he must be dreaming, Ziya took a few apprehensive steps to touch the gravestone. He passed his hands over it, half fearing that if he touched it too hard it might go flying out of this world. When he turned around, he suddenly saw the name Macit Karakaş on another gravestone seven or eight feet ahead of him, and the name Ercüment Şahiner on another. Without knowing what he was doing, he walked first towards one, and then the other, but he couldn’t reach either. Because now, before his eyes, there was a blur he recognised as Binnaz Hanım’s round cheeks. Am I losing my mind? he asked himself. Frightened now, he hobbled over to the cemetery gate. And as he hurried over that uneven ground, giving no thought to the bones whitening beneath it, he saw first Veli Sarı’s name on a gravestone, and then Halime Çil’s name, and then, on another gravestone, he saw the name of the clerk from the neighbouring company, Sergeant Rasim Benli. And that was when Ziya cried out, Dear God, what are these people doing here, or is Hulki Dede right, is the world really only a few pastures wide? Dry-mouthed and half-crazed and gasping for breath, he rushed back to the barn.
Just as he was passing through the gap in the hedge, a huge brute blocked his way. ‘Do you feel no shame?’ he said. ‘Doing that with a child that age?’ Swinging his club, he brought it down with all his strength on Ziya’s head. Ziya fell to the ground, bleeding and in shock. After the huge brute had struck him once again, he struggled to his feet and began to run down towards the plain, to the poplars. The brute pointed after him. ‘He’s running away, boys! He’s running away!’ And a few more men carrying clubs came out from behind the hedge, and together they all raced after him. Still not believing that this was really happening, Ziya kept glancing over his shoulder. When he saw they had grown in number, he gathered together what strength he had left and increased his speed. In spite of these efforts, he was captured by Numan next to the sheep pens. And when he was captured, he got another blow in the head amongst those rocks that were the size of fists. He fell to his knees for a moment. Escaping from Numan’s hands, he went racing through the brambles; bent over double, running for his life, he headed for the mountains.
When he reached the oak forest, he felt half dead, and that was why he sat down behind a rock for a while, to catch his breath. As he sat there, panting, he slowly craned his neck to look down at the crowd of men below. Twenty-five or thirty men in front, all holding clubs, and scattered behind them, another fifteen or twenty people holding things he couldn’t quite see, and they were all climbing up the hill. As he looked at them, he thought, ‘They can’t all be coming after me, surely the ones at the back have come out to stop those crazed brutes in the front.’ He even looked to see if he could find anyone amongst them who looked like Hulki Dede, but he couldn’t.
Then he got up and, so as not to be caught by the people still streaming up the slopes, he hurried out of the oak wood to run as fast as he could into the red-pine forest. Soon he had run all the way up to the nameless shadow at the top of the mountain and saw it was a ramshackle old hut, but by now he lacked the strength to walk a single step. So he crawled to a rock just outside it. He curled up at the foot of this rock and waited, quiet as a rabbit. His forehead, his cheeks, his shirt, his collar; they were all drenched in blood. But now he began to drift off to sleep. His eyelids grew heavy; his soul, too. And soon sleep had softened his aching head wounds, even. But he could still hear the voices of the men coming after him so his terror grew and grew. What if they caught up with him? He could hear their footsteps coming right up to the edge of the pines. Sometimes he even thought he could see the men’s faces, blackened with anger, and whenever he did, he curled up closer to the rock. Then he remembered something Binnaz Hanım had said. He who wishes to pray should also carry a stone to throw. Remembering those words, and thinking how bad it would be if he fell asleep, he walked twenty-five or thirty metres, until he’d reached the hut. He was bent over double by the time he got there. Dirt and dust, from top to toe. He could barely stand. That’s why he lifted his hand and pounded so hard on the door. And the wooden door echoed back.
I got up and pulled it open.
He burst into the room and threw his arms around me. Together we shut the door and limped slowly away from the window. Outside there were men running back and forth, shouting.
‘They’re looking for me,’ he said in a faint, dull voice.
I whispered gently into his ear. ‘I know.’
He lifted his head to look into my eyes. It was almost as if he didn’t believe he was right there beside me, with his hand on my shoulder, and talking.
‘Come,’ I said. ‘Let’s watch through the window.’
‘They might look in and see me,’ he said in a shaky voice.
‘They can’t,’ I said. ‘You can see out through these windows, but you can’t see from the outside in.’
‘Like sleep that has holes in it,’ he whispered.
I said nothing.
We went over to the window. The voices outside were getting a lot louder. It was just about possible to hear what the men were shouting to each other. Then suddenly they were there right in front of us, these men. One in front, and the others behind him, all bearing clubs. The man in front was Cabbar, and his face was red from anger. Red as a pomegranate. His hair flew wildly around his face. His shirt tails had come out of his trousers.
Seeing them, Ziya said, ‘You’re not going to hand me over, are you, if they come to the door?’
‘They won’t come to the door,’ I said.
He glanced at me suspiciously. Then he collapsed on to the divan next to the window. Curled up into a ball. And stared outside.
One of the men running through the pine forest turned to another and said, ‘I found him. I found him!’
The men in the forest turned on their heels and all came racing towards the place the voice had come from. For a while, the pine trees’ lower branches swayed, the stones and the pine cones hit against each other as they rolled across the ground, the high grass rose and fell, and the blue sky pulled back, as if to escape from the grasp of the trees.