No one is firing at him. He lies face down and hangs on to the bushes and thistles with his good arm. He digs his fingernails into the soil and looks up for an instant to the top of the hill. No, there is no one following me. Didn’t anyone see me rolling down? Is everyone trying to save themselves? Did they see me tumbling down the hill like a stone and take me for dead, or is it something else? Whose bullet shot me? This is the question that hurts more than his wounds and gnaws at his insides and settles heavily on the stones, the rocks and his heart. I was caught in the crossfire. Had I thought of defecting, had it crossed my mind even for a moment? No … Yes … Yes! No. I don’t know. I was at the front, not from heroism, just an error in calculation … I shouldn’t have crept up so far. Why did I do it? Was I the bravest? Or was I running towards the soldiers? No, I don’t know.
He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t want to know. He hopes he was hit by a soldier’s bullet. The idea of being shot with a heval bullet is as good as committing a sin. It was an enemy bullet. It came from the opposite side. It must have winged me. Or is the bullet still lodged there? He feels his shoulder with his hand. He was wounded from behind. He shudders. I was facing the enemy, but I may have turned around for a moment when I realized I was a good way away from our group.
The enemy: a nameless, soulless, bodiless, faceless concept, a ghost. He can’t bring himself to call soldiers ‘the enemy’. My cousin Mamudo — he was also called Mahmut after our great-grandfather — my namesake and my soulmate … He is in the military, and I am here. Hıdır of the Zahos is a soldier, and his cousin is with the guerrillas. This is why his heart ached whenever he placed a bullet in his rifle, every time he fired, especially at the beginning. Now are we supposed to call these kekos enemies? We must of course. We have to. Once you get used to saying the word ‘enemy’ they really will be enemies. Keep on saying it and you will learn the enemy by heart. You will shoot the ones you’ve learnt to call the enemy, hurt them, take revenge and become a great warrior, a hero. Mahmut senses the aggressive power of the word that hones the mind. He knows that a tongue can become a weapon. What he can’t understand is why he has such difficulty in identifying the so-called enemy as such. When you come face to face with him, when you look him in the eye, you don’t see the enemy; you see another human being. If you have a split second to think, even when you are pointing your guns at one another, you cannot understand why you are foes. Some people have sent soldiers to the mountains, and others have led the guerrillas to soldiers and village guards. Instead of having a smoke together, chatting about your loved ones and showing photographs to each other, you shoot and kill. Then the one who is faster and a better shot, whose hand doesn’t tremble when pulling the trigger and who doesn’t nurse sentimental ideas, is the one who stays alive.
He was the first to realize that gradually he was becoming a bad fighter, sometimes missing the target on purpose. What was worse, he was staying in the rear during combat. This was due to his inability to call the soldier the ‘enemy’ and his obsession with ‘Is that my cousin facing me?’ He was afraid that the hevals would realize this, too, and his group commander would know. He knew that he would be criticized for being soft and weak. He would have to deliver a self-criticism and try to make it up to them; nothing would be the same as before, and a doubt would always remain somewhere in the hearts of his comrades. What was worse, one could be tried as a traitor, a caş, a secret agent and then … In the camp, one snowy morning at dawn they had executed Seydo who had panicked and attempted to surrender in the middle of a battle, and they had made all the troops stand and watch as a lesson. Mahmut had pretended to look but he hadn’t been able to. He had just seen the warm blood spreading on to the snow as it flowed from the chest of the boy who had fallen face down on the ground. Later, when they were carrying his still warm body towards the frozen rocks to hurl him into the darkness of the deep valley, he had noticed that the boy’s feet had become purple and swollen from the cold. What hurt him most and tore his insides to shreds was not death but those purple feet.
And yet, as things stand, if I’m to be shot let me be shot with a soldier’s bullet. The bullet of a soldier is preferable to that of the organization. If the former, you go as a martyr; if the latter, as a traitor. It is the same death, but the names are different.
To have studied at university, not to mention medical school if only for three terms, was a privilege that brought one safety at the beginning. It was rumoured that the leaders took the educated and the students under their wing. You felt well supported. However, some of the troops in the mountains, especially certain commanders, had no sympathy for those who had studied or for the students who came from the city. ‘These people have problems in focusing, and they can’t stand hardship. They tend to broadcast their concerns and lower the others’ morale.’ Such words were circulated in whispers and sometimes even out loud. You could sense what they thought about you from the attitude of the people who were close to the commanders. A few incidents in the camp had been enough for Mahmut to understand that he was being given the cold shoulder. He felt that they had taken him along on the last combat because they had to — and perhaps to test him as well.
I’m not a traitor. I have never been one. From time to time children would be taken from their villages against their will. However, no one brought me to the mountains by force Most of us were not obliged to come here. It was our choice. We felt in our hearts the sound, the poetry, the legend of the mountain. We combined them with the heroic stories we had acquired since childhood. We fortified the memory of our raided, evacuated, burnt villages with rebellion against our poverty, our oppression and rejection.
We followed the sad songs of comradeship that echoed over hill and dale:
Dur neçe heval
Na na! Tu dur neçe!
We dedicated our squalid, hopeless, futureless lives to legends of liberation, silently and without feeling the need for ponderous words. We were ready to believe and we believed. We were ready to fight and we fought.
His father used to say things like ‘The future is not in the mountains. Dahati ne li çiyanan e. You can fight each other in the mountains. You kill and get killed, but you can’t build a future with guns and weapons. You can’t gain your rights in the mountains. If you study and have a good career you can save and enlighten both yourself and other Kurds.’ Nobody forced me to take to the mountains. To the contrary, they always told me not to go. I was never coerced into joining the organization.
I believed my father. I thought I could do it. I thought I could save myself. The whole family collected rubbish to pay for my courses. My father, that great proud man who was a descendant of holy wise men, rummaged in bins. He always tied a scarf over his face, not to avoid the foul stench, but the shame of being recognized.
He had studied very hard. Only two students from the course had got into university that year. He had won a place at medical school, his first choice, too; what was more, at a university close by, in his region. People had looked down their noses at him, saying, ‘You can’t become a doctor in those provincial universities. At most you will learn how to dress wounds, and no one will give you a decent job. All you will be able to do is to help midwives and give injections in state-run health centres.’ But the family was overjoyed. His father had patted him on the back, and his mother had thrown her arms around her son and wept. The neighbours had come to congratulate him and had been offered refreshments and sweets his mother had made out of nothing. My mother had always been a secret hoarder. She had produced the last of the five gold pieces that had been given at her wedding. They thought it had been spent long ago, but she had put it aside for a rainy day. They bought me a new pair of jeans, a good pair of trousers, some shirts and a pair of shoes. Their son was going to appear in public. No one should look at him askance; he should not feel wanting or ashamed. Everyone had believed things would work out, even Mahmut himself.