Reckless

by Hasan Ali Toptas

  After watching him slip away like that, Ziya turned back to Kenan. ‘Shall we go now?’

  Excusing themselves to Kâzım and the other villagers, they got up and left.

  The old man woke up as they passed. Raising his head, he grabbed Ziya by the wrist and pulled him towards him with a friendly smile. For a moment, they locked eyes, saying nothing.

  ‘So what’s this all about?’ the man said, reproachfully. ‘Aren’t we going to have a chance to talk?’

  ‘We will,’ said Ziya.

  ‘May you go in health and happiness,’ said the old man. ‘When you’re bored, come and find me, and we can sit and talk.’

  Ziya nodded in agreement.

  And then the old man’s face went sour. His eyes bored into Ziya’s, as if to measure his discomfort. Then he stood up and, hanging on Ziya’s arm, pulled him a few steps back

  ‘Do you know what?’ he said then. ‘Don’t ever say I didn’t warn you on the day you came, but you’re a city person. Stay here too long and your teeth will crumble.’

  Ziya stood there looking at him, and said nothing.

  ‘You know why?’ the old man continued. ‘Because a man’s teeth come to resemble him. I know what I’m saying, and that’s why I say it. That’s why I just told you – come back when you’re bored, and we can talk.’

  ‘All right,’ said Ziya. ‘I will.’

  Then Kenan took hold of his other arm and pulled him away. Leaving the old man to the sun, they walked off, side by side.

  ‘Hulki Dede always talks like that,’ said Kenan, when they were some distance away. ‘He’s the strangest man in the village. There’s no knowing what he’ll do next. Sometimes he refuses to say a word, for instance. He’ll just walk through the village like a black cloud, saying nothing. Or he’ll take a little sack of bread and go off to some corner, rest his staff on his knees, and stare miserably at the world around him, saying nothing. He flutters his eyes as if he’s praying, he looks at the mountains, and the birds, and the children, and the clouds and the wind, as if he’s chanting a prayer. And in the meantime, the bread sack at his knees fills up with ants. But he doesn’t so much as give these ants a look. Like I just said, he’s in some sort of trance. He’s looking into the world beyond. And after this has gone on for days and days, Hulki Dede comes back, and then suddenly he’s making these big pronouncements and speaking out of turn, and it’s almost as if he were trying to make up for all that silence. And you know what? The first time you hear them, the things he says sound crazy. But once those crazy words of his have been planted in your mind for a while, once they’ve been out in the world and met up with other words or just taken in a bit of their steam, well, it’s almost like magic, they begin to change before your eyes. Once they’ve found their place in the world, they gain something. They gain meaning. I don’t know, maybe that’s just how it seems.’

  ‘So tell me,’ said Ziya. ‘Who is this Kâzım who came to our table to give us such a warm welcome? Is he your relative?’

  ‘No,’ said Kenan. ‘We’re not related to Kâzım the Bellows Man. But he’s a good man. He’s always ready to help, and he’s unbelievably kind and honest. No matter who it is, if there’s anyone in the village needing help, he’s the first to race over. Even if his own two hands were bleeding, he’d come to help. He’d never say it to my face, not now, but he also loves me dearly. He’d move heaven and earth.’

  Ziya said nothing.

  When they reached the edge of the village, Kenan gave his watch a quick glance. Once again, he said he had important business to attend to and would not be able to come out as far as the barn.

  ‘You mustn’t treat me like a guest,’ said Ziya. ‘There’s no need for you to come, anyway. I am fine to go alone.’

  They smiled at each other.

  ‘There was that pigeon,’ he said then. ‘You know, the one that landed on the roof of the Seyrantepe guardhouse. Do you remember?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Kenan, shaking his head.

  ‘How can you not remember?’ said Ziya in a plaintive voice. ‘Can’t you remember pointing it out to me, when we were drawing water from the well to do our laundry?’

  ‘I may well have done that, but I can’t remember,’ said Kenan.

  Ziya fell silent. Biting his lower lip, as if to soften his disappointment, he gazed for a long time into the distance.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said in a tense voice. ‘I forgot to tell you this, but in my dream the other night, I saw that same pigeon.’

  Uncertain what to say, Kenan stared blankly over Ziya’s shoulder, searching the sky as if he could see his whole past there, fading into nothingness.

  ‘I remember now,’ he said then. ‘I do! I honestly do!’

  Ziya searched his friend’s face, as if to ask, ‘Do you really? Or are you just saying that to please me?’

  But when he spoke, it was to say, ‘Right, so that was the pigeon that visited me the other night in my dream, and it didn’t just visit, it smashed through my landlady’s window and made a big commotion.’

  ‘That’s how dreams are,’ said Kenan.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ Ziya said. He was suddenly serious. ‘What’s happening is that this bird is following me.’

  ‘Why?’

  Slowly, very slowly, Ziya sat down on the mound next to the road. He looked tired and frightened, all of a sudden: the lines on his face seemed deeper. The light had gone out of his eyes.

  Kenan went and crouched down next to him.

  ‘Do you want to know why that bird is following me?’ Ziya said, lowering his voice. ‘It’s because forty-two years ago, I killed a little bird, and well, you’re the first person I’ve ever told. I was never good at aiming, and so I still can’t understand how I killed it. Maybe it was just a terrible once-in-a-thousand-years coincidence. I just don’t know. This bird I’m telling you about – I’d been running through the woods that day, and it suddenly appeared, right in front of me. You should have seen it. So tiny, so sweet, and so silent. And you could feel it echoing inside. Like it was your heart, your liver, your spleen, or your kidneys, like – I don’t know. It just echoed, everywhere inside you. It just gathered itself inside you, this bird, calm as calm. And there, in the speckled shade, was that little face, as radiant as a calm and distant lake. You would almost think it was watching us from another world, this bird, watching us and judging. From the moment I set eyes on it, this bird stole my heart. Was it love? I’m not sure. It was something more like reverence. Or some kind of trance. Yes, as young as I was, and for all the tumult going on around me, I saw something I had never seen before and it shone a light on me that pierced the depths of my soul. And that’s why I couldn’t move. I just stood there, without saying a word. And by then I was very frightened. I was frightened because of all those other boys running through the woods with their slings who would kill this little bird without a single thought. I feared for this little bird. I don’t know. Maybe I killed the bird so that no one else could. Because, yes, in the end I killed it. I wasn’t able to stop myself, and I killed it . . . And as soon as I did, I saw what a big mistake I had made. And after that, I couldn’t stay there any longer. I turned back at once. I ran back into town, panting and sweating all the way.’

  Ziya fell silent for a time, and his breathing was as heavy as if he was still running back into town.

  ‘Do you know what?’ he said then. ‘Maybe what I killed that day was more than just that bird.’

  ‘Then what was it?’ Kenan asked.

  ‘How can I be sure?’ Ziya asked. ‘It was like an electric current, this enormous current sending one image after another, coursing through me, and maybe that was what I killed, thinking it was a bird. I recognised it in passing, and I killed it. And then its little body fell into the grass, but its soul has followed me for ever after. Wherever I look, it’s always there, hovering just beyond my lashes. Year in, year out. Sometimes it’s a shadow, sometimes a silhouette. Or a leaf, or a sock, or anything
else that might happen to be the length of a hand. And then, when it’s chased me for a while, it begins to expand: if it’s started out like a baby sparrow, it will grow to the size of a pigeon, given time. It might not stop there. I just can’t know. All I know is that wherever I go, it follows me.’

  ‘If you ask me, you’re exaggerating again,’ said Kenan. ‘What’s done is done. Like all children, you did something thoughtless once upon a time. Where’s the sense in judging that child after forty-two years? And anyway, why should that bird’s soul want to follow you?’

  ‘I’m not judging that child after forty-two years. I started forty-two years ago, and I’ve been judging him ever since.’

  After glancing quickly at the watch on his left wrist, Kenan said, ‘I understand. But the pigeon on the roof of that guardhouse wasn’t looking at you, as I recall. It was looking at all that activity around the well, or the graves just beyond it. Or Syria.’

  ‘You’re mistaken,’ said Ziya sadly. ‘Even when that pigeon was looking at Syria, it was really looking at me. And when it was looking at those graves, it was looking at me, too. I swear to you. Wherever it looked, it was also looking at me. When I was standing guard at the observation tower, it would keep flying in and out. It would land on that rusty balcony and fix its eyes on me, and stare. It would stay there all day, baking in that angry sun.’

  Kenan said nothing. He just stared at Ziya, in the way someone might stare at a little child who is lost to his daydreams.

  ‘You shouldn’t fret about things like this,’ he said, as he rose to his feet. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I need to go now, to see to that business.’

  Ziya stood up, too, and after they had said their goodbyes, he headed across the plain down the dirt road that would take him back to the barn.

  That evening, he sat for many hours on the bench outside the barn. He drank tea after tea, and smoked cigarette after cigarette, and watched the mountains sink slowly into the dusk, until at last they were lost to a night as black and thick as ink. But now and then, a star pierced through it, and each little pinprick seemed smaller than the last. From the village came the dim glow of its two streetlamps, and the lights of the houses on its edge. And that was all that could be seen: the stars, the streetlamps, and a few dim lights. From one end to the other, the sky was dark and still. But floating through this black silence was a moist current that ran green. And the silence itself went in waves, down corridors, and through doors, and there were times when Ziya could almost feel it entering inside him, to take him over. And then he thought about that first silence, the silence that was never to return, and – almost as if there were someone sitting with him – whispered, ‘But really. What was that silence really, I wonder?’ And then, for a time, he wondered if all the silences that had come afterwards were no more than fragments of that first silence, fallen from the sky. He thought about how big these silences could be, and how small, and then he thought how each one was different. Anxious as a child, he made a list: there were wet silences, and deep silences, light silences, and heavy silences, distant silences, pregnant silences, and warm silences. Then, all of a sudden, he thought of Besim’s silence, and for a few minutes he held his breath, as he conjured him up again, there in the shade of the mulberry tree. Then he stood up and, with his tea glass in one hand, and his ashtray in the other, he looked into the black night for a moment, before heading inside. After leaving his things on the kitchen counter, he went straight to bed. The moment his head hit the pillow, he shut his eyes, turned his back on all the thoughts shimmering in his mind, and tried to go to sleep. He wanted to get up early the next morning and take a long solitary walk into the mountains. Or rather, what he wanted more than the long walk was to surround himself with nature, and its beauties. He wanted to cleanse himself in its gaze, and in its soul. He wanted to breathe the same air as the trees and the grass and the rocks, and walk with the insects, and if he could find it – if he could find a space of time great enough, resting in the shadows of those rustling leaves – he wanted to lose himself inside it.

  But in the end, Ziya did not wake up as early as he had hoped; by the time he opened his eyes, the sun had already risen over the cliffs, and it had done more than that, it had already risen a spear’s length above them. And that was why Ziya used a teabag instead of brewing a whole pot for his breakfast, so that he could get going without further delay. He’d not got around to slicing any tomatoes or cucumbers, and neither had he boiled an egg. All he ate with that tasteless tea was some cheese and bread. As soon as he’d finished his tea, he got up and cleared the table. He was just leaving the house with his cigarettes and lighter when he saw Besim.

  The boy was holding two five-litre plastic bottles of water. He’d stopped a few paces in front of the doorway, and now he was staring shyly at the door.

  Ziya felt both happy and upset at the sight of him. He ran over to him at once to take the bottles from his hands and set them on the ground. In a fatherly voice, he said, ‘You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble. I could have carried my own water, once I’d run out.’

  With a faint and timid smile, Besim said, ‘It’s no trouble at all.’

  His voice was smooth, and as bright as the hair that fell over his face. And that was why Ziya just stood there staring next to the plastic bottles. Or rather, he stood there because he had no idea how to act, confronted with an innocence so natural. ‘It would be fine if I don’t take that walk today,’ he thought. And then suddenly, he was asking Besim if he’d had any breakfast. Hearing that he had, but wishing the boy to stay on for a while, instead of going straight back to the village, Ziya told a lie. ‘I’m afraid to say I’ve just woken up,’ he said. ‘I still haven’t had breakfast myself.’

  Besim looked at him in silence.

  ‘So let me brew some good strong tea,’ Ziya said. ‘And let’s take the table outside, so that you and I can sit across from each other, and have a good breakfast!’

  ‘I’ve already eaten,’ Besim said again.

  ‘So what,’ said Ziya, in a determined voice. ‘You can sit down and have a glass of tea, at least. Look, you’ve just carried out those huge bottles for me. Won’t you let me offer you a tea, at least?’

  Besim still looked uncertain.

  As Ziya said, ‘Will you accept my offer?’ he gave him a good, long look.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Besim. ‘My uncle has gone to see Uncle Cevval, and I need to be at home by the time he gets back.’

  His hopes dashed, Ziya had no idea what to say. He made a few more attempts to keep the boy from leaving, but he was unable to persuade him. So instead he just stood there, unblinking, as Besim made his way back down the hill, and there was a moment when he had to swallow hard. And when he did so, it was because he was reliving that moment in the bookshop sixteen years ago, as violently as if it were happening for the first time; once again, the floor of the shopping centre buckled, and sheets of glass went smashing through the air, and suddenly all was darkness. And then Ziya picked up the plastic bottles, and carried them through that darkness. Not knowing where else to put them, he left them on the kitchen counter. He went outside and lit a cigarette, and thought about the walk he’d been planning, before all this happened. And then he set off.

  5

  The Border

  Until he reached the dirt road on the plain, Ziya kept changing his mind about what direction he would take. But when he got there, he did not pause. He let the sheep pens and the poplars fall away to his right as he climbed up into the brown hills, and he kept up his speed even when he reached the high grass. He was walking as fast as if he hoped never to return. Once again, he heard the faint clacking of grouse somewhere near him; he saw the branches shudder with a nameless warmth, and he saw the trail that these shudders left behind them as they rose from those branches to flutter through the air. Then he walked for forty-five or maybe fifty minutes across that plain lined with junipers and all its yellow-headed, pink-headed, purple-headed bramb
les. By now he was struggling for breath, so he stopped in the shade of a large oak tree to take a short rest. And just then he heard a rustling in the leaves above, and as it rained down, he could feel something settle inside him. And once he’d sat down, he passed his hand over the grass. Then he did it again. And yet again, caressing this grass as gently as if he feared causing it harm. Then he passed his hand over the rocks. He touched the ground, too. He planted his hand on it and left it there, as if to measure the earth’s pulse. After that, he lit a cigarette, and narrowing his eyes he gazed for a long time through the clouds of his own smoke at the hills and plains below. The dirt road had vanished, of course, and all he could see in the depths behind the juniper trees were the ash-coloured tips of the poplars and, here and there, a roof. Beyond these he could see the mountains, so faint and flat that they might have been sketched with a pencil.

  And so that’s how it was that day, and as Ziya sat there smoking, letting his eyes wander from field to hill, and roof to mountain, he thought again about what good deed he might have done for Kenan in the army. He went back through his memories, scouring each for clues, but to his consternation he found nothing. Then he stubbed out his cigarette and continued on his way, but still he couldn’t stop wondering what that good deed might have been. As he left the oak forest to wander amongst the red pines that reached up, moaning, to the sky, as he padded over the path carpeted with yellowing pine needles, and climbed the hills, scaled the steep rock faces, and crossed the limpid, bubbling brooks, he kept asking himself: I wonder what good deed I did. What was that good deed I did? I wonder.

  And so that’s what he did that day. As he thought about his days in the army, he went deeper and deeper into the forest. And soon he was far, far from the village, and with this forest stretching endlessly in all directions, groaning and moaning, clicking and clucking, and taunting him with visions. He’d see a hill just ahead, for example, or a brook close enough for him to hear its waters burbling, or a clearing surrounded by majestic pines, awaiting him in plain view, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t reach them. But there were other times when he saw a cliff so far away he’d think, no, I could never get that far, but then, at just that moment, he would suddenly find himself rushing forward, at an impossible speed. And when he reached that cliff, he would stop, exalted, to catch his breath, and he’d think about how quickly he’d come this far, and as he looked around him, he’d ask himself: am I really here? And that was when he sensed a playful hand he could not see, reaching out to him from a distance he could not measure. But his faith in himself and the natural world began to falter, and the more it faltered, the more fearfully he looked around him. And then, without warning, he was walking into darkness. A silence descended. A humid silence, pierced with thorns. The great pines had merged into a single mass, and their intertwined branches had blocked out the sun, but now and again, a ray would burst through, and as he watched this dazzling shaft of light travel downwards, he wondered if it was divine. By now the darkness was seeping out from every orifice to wrap itself around the trunks of the pine trees and to tie up their branches. And Ziya was walking blind through this darkness, in which each leaf quivered. And with each new step, he asked himself what this good deed was that he’d done for Kenan.