Sleep by Sabahattin Ali

My friend and I were on our way from Yildizeli to Sivas, waiting on the side of the roadway for an automobile to come. The evening was just beginning. The genius among us had recommended that instead of waiting for the train coming in the middle of the night, that we try to hitch a ride with one of the frequently passing trucks on the roadway. And so there we had stood for the last hour and a half, looking out hopefully at every dust cloud that appeared in the distance. Every time one did I thought to myself that the expression “frequently” didn’t quite describe the hour long intervals between passing trucks. Finally, once it was completely dark, a pair of car lights shone through a dust cloud approaching the place where we were standing. We stood out in the middle of the road with our arms flailing in the air making help signals like we were escaping from a fire or a flood. The truck stopped in front of us. After bargaining a little and agreeing to pay fifty each to sit next to the driver we got in.

As soon as we started moving, we cut one another off asking a series of questions. We found out that this this old trusty packhorse of a truck that appeared to have come from some bygone era had started off three days before in Erbaa and had taken a load to Turhal where, upon finding a load of sugar destined for Sivas, had thus far reached us. As I turned my head above my neck I saw the massive pile of sacks which seemed to me like they contained white crystal. Whether it was the shaking of the automobile or what have you, I was struck by a strange queasiness.

I asked the driver “do you have any other customers?”

After a few minutes of silence he gently threw his head back and said “three woman…they’re sleeping on top of the sacks.”

At this point from back amongst the sacks above my head came an additional explanation by the driver’s assistant.

“we came across them on the road. It’s not clear what they were doing, but they paid cash up front so we picked them up.”

He spoke about these women, who were probably laid out amongst the same sacks, their legs splayed over each other, describing their clothing and shape and faces as if he had never thought that they might take offence at what he was saying. The automobile sped over some bumps and the assistant stopped rambling on to excitedly shout: “ Chief!”

We immediately turned our eyes to the driver. He lurched about in his seat and with one hand rubbed his eyes while tightly clutching the steering wheel with the other.

My friend and I looked at each other without understanding a thing. The assistant gave us another explanation.

“It’s nothing, don’t worry about it…he hasn’t slept in two days, tonight will make it his third…once in a while he dozes off.”

Then, without caring whether or not the person being talked about could hear him, he added:

“Off, I hope nothing happens to us…it'd be quite a shame to die, if he nods off just poke him”

We looked at each other again, but this time it wasn’t from not understanding anything, but from knowing too much…

The automobile stopped suddenly. A few meters in front of us the truck’s high beams lit up a spring on the left side of the road. In a voice groggy with sleep the driver cried:

“Rahmi!”

“What’s up chief?”

“hop out, put water on the machine”

In back there was movement. The sound of a tincan. Then we finally saw the assistant whose voice we had just been hearing. Well to the tell the truth it wasn’t him exactly, rather a kind of mask one gets from his kind of profession and journey. His powder white eyelashes and hair weren’t always like that I’m sure, and his real face, which wore a plaster of sweat, engine grease, gasoline and dust must have had a different appearance and color all together. After filling up the can in the fountain he emptied it in the radiator. As he approached where the driver sat he spoke

“all set chief”.

On his face was an expression that was, although tired, in no way suggestive of ever losing its cheerfulness.

At this the driver, who had been apparently napping shortly with his head on the steering wheel, vaulted from his seat.

“huh? All set?... did you close the cap well?” he said.

The assistant’s eyes lit up with cheer.

“Everything is good to go chief!”

“Look again!”

The driver put his head back on the steering wheel. After the assistant checked the cap on the radiator again, he called out wearing a relentless smile.

“All right Chief, all right!”

Knowing he hadn’t been saved, the driver groaned and lifted up his head. After giving out a slightly louder groan once more, he took to the road.

As the night wore on, the driver’s fight with sleep got worse. Not wanting to say anything too direct I asked “are there often accidents on this road?” making sure to emphasize the words “this road”. The driver gave an incomprehensible answer, but from behind us came the pert voice of the assistant “Not always!..”

One of the women who we had up until that point not been able to make out, in a broken and gruff Central Anatolian accent asked:

“the other day where did the wife of that finance office boss die?”

the assistant replied

“we passed it already I think”

Through his sleepiness the driver revised the statement.

“no we haven’t gotten there yet pal”

I worriedly asked

“what happened? Did a woman die?”

I hoped to wake up the driver a little by getting him into the conversation. He explained the ordeal in broken sentences. Occasionally the assistant would cut in to correct him“no it wasn’t like that, what happened was that” and as the travelling women joined in the conversation it really picked up steam.

The driver:

“the wife really was a cranky one…it was obvious something like this would happen one day”

The assistant pounced on this:

“The husband was even a bigger pain…he would tell drivers “if you roll us into this ditch you're not going to be able to save me.”

The driver shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know him well…Just took him to Sivas once. That time though it was more like I was taking him on an pleasure cruise. He made me stop forty times. We’d go a hundred paces and then he would shout “Driver stop, I want to take off my coat! Driver stop! I want to put on some powder. Driver stop! I’m rocking back and forth too much, it’s making my head spin, let’s wait here a little bit. Ugh, I regret not having taken my own car…”

“So how exactly did the crash happen?” I asked cutting in. The assistant said:

“they were returning from Sivas in a truck the wife and husband together. The truck belonged to that little wimpy kid we know…only fifteen years old… the day before the right wheel rod had come off and he had tied it back on with string…without fixing it in Sivas he picked up his passenger and set off again..”

“The municipality, don’t they inspect vehicles?” I asked.

The assistant didn’t answer. The driver answered while half looking at me: “The municipality gives out penalties to drivers whenever it’s paying their salary, otherwise they leave us alone!”

We were quiet for a moment. The driver tried to shake off sleep that he so desperately wanted, and the assistant continued the story.

“The wife was just as big of a pain. She made the truck pull over a bunch of times on the road. Maybe this time she actually sensed that there was something wrong. Anyways, her, the husband, and the driver were all sitting together. Just like you guys are!”

This unpleasant comparison made our hair stand on end.

“the wife was on the side of the door. As soon as the truck made a small noise, she would tell the driver to stop. Then suddenly when she heard a crunching sound in the back, the woman opened the door and jumped out the door.”

“did she fall under the wheel?” I cried.

“No!” he said “even worse…the back wheel rod really had come off . Because the truck was carrying a load this time the tire popped. The woman, not knowing where she could run too,  just stood there at the side of the vehicle. The truck slid to the right, the woman was caught on the fender as it capsized over onto her in a ditch”

Then, after trying to have a little more respect for the dead, he continued.

“She was gone in an instant, there wasn’t a thing left of her.”

The woman in back cut in:

“the husband covered her with his jacket and didn’t stop crying. The villagers performed a mourning ceremony!”

The assistant didn’t agree:

“No dear…the next day I saw that guy in the park, head thrown back, he was laughing!..”

The driver, shook his head and in a sympathetic voice added:

“Maybe, I mean both crying and laughing…If your wife…if she dies you cry, but you’re happy to have made it out alive!”

For a long while none of us opened our mouths. The truck kept rumbling on.

I suddenly noticed how forty or fifty feet in front of us the road was abruptly cut off by darkness. I hadn’t noticed until that moment how quickly the vehicle was driving and it looked as though it was driving into an abyss.

“Good lord!” I screamed clinging to the driving wheel and turning to my left.

“Ha!” said the driver as he woke from his sleep and hit the brakes. “We came to a curve, man” he muttered. The front lamps illuminated the field covered in short grass and the deep ditch directly in front of us.  The road meandered away from us on our left like a shiny white ribbon. Not being able to contain myself I yelled: “get yourself together man! You were about to flip the truck over!”

The driver, knowing it was his fault, said in a lightly apologetic voice “nothing would have happened.”

The assistant, trying to contain the mockery in his voice said “we wouldn’t have flipped over. The front wheels would have gone into the ditch. We would have just stopped suddenly.” He then added with a slightly more cheery tone. “But I guess when we stopped suddenly the rear tires would have popped up into the air and the sugar sacks would have come down on our heads!”

I turned my head and tried to give a look to let him know how inappropriate his comment were, but besides darkness and a few sacks I couldn’t see a thing.

After this the driver, sleep, and the engine began another epic battle. This poor man was half way through his third sleepless night and his hands were shaking on the driving wheel. A few times he even had to hold onto himself in order to wake up. He looked at us with pleading eyes.

“Please help me, let’s stop somewhere and let me sleep for ten minutes…after that we can keep going.”

I was fine with that. My friend was a little more experienced.

“no way.” He said. “if he sleeps a little we won’t be able to wake him up before noon. If we have to force him to wake up there will be all kinds of trouble. Forget it, we have to keep going”

All of a sudden the engine stopped and the driver cried out.

“Rahmi, put water on the engine”

On the side of the road there really was a spring flowing that looked as wide as a rope. In the silence of the night you could hear the slight eerie sound of babbling water. The driver put his head down on the driving wheel and stayed motionless. The same thing happened about two or three kilometers down the road as well. The man’s exhausted, half-open eyes didn’t miss even the smallest spring he could find on the left or right of the road. The truck would stop with a jolt and his voice would mix with the smell of gasoline and the dust cloud.

“Rahmi…” his voice would echo in the darkness. Every time we would wake up the driver he would repeatedly ask us with pleading looks “Please help, just let me sleep five minutes!” We stopped again. Even though I looked all around I didn’t see any spring. Somewhere in the distance you could hear the light babbling of water.

“Rahmi, put water in the engine!”

“I just put some in Chief”

“Quiet man…the road is bad…the engine is upset!”

A lot of drivers in fact would have described this road as “very good” with its lack of curves, or slopes, and only a little bit of gravel sprinkled on the road, but he was in such bad shape that he was willing to rely on a little exaggeration to get two or three minutes of sleep.

Rahmi got out with his tin can and started looking for the spring on the side of the road. But there was nothing there. Finally he descended the slope on the left side of the road, walked down the muddy little channel between weeds, and found a pathetic little stream of water flowing into the ditch. It was impossible to fill his little can with this water, but the purpose wasn’t to put water in the radiator anyways but to stop for a few minutes. Rahmi seemed to understand this as he poured the water from his cupped palms into the tin can, looking like he too was being overcome by sleep. Trying to walk on his own numbed legs he shouted his merciless phrase again:

“Alright chief!”

This time it didn’t look like the driver would wake up. His hair which had turned white with dust peaked out from under his cloth cap and sprawled out over the driving wheel. His head looked like a block of wood as he lay there totally spent. The assistant repeated.

“alright Chief let’s go!”

When this looked like it wasn’t of any use, I cut in, prodding the driver:

“Come on…wake up…we’re almost there”

I hadn’t the faintest idea how much longer we had to go, but I wanted to give the poor man a little bit of encouragement.

The driver picked up his head.

“I can’t go anymore my good man!” he said and then fell back forward. I looked at my friend. There was no mercy on his face. In a stern voice he said “Enough with this “I can’t go anymore”…sit up, throw a little water on your face, you’ll wake up!” The driver stirred, opening up his side door. With the way he moved it looked like he had rocks tied to each of his limbs. With these invisible rocks attached to his feet he stumbled as far as the edge of the ditch. There he stood for a moment. It looked as though to him getting to the water on the other side was some important and difficult quest. Finally he collapsed in the spot where he stood and while waving his hand towards us he said. “Give me five minutes guys…I’m going to sleep for five minutes!” and there in the dust he spread out lengthwise. We stood there helplessly looking at each other. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes we waited. Rahmi put his tincan down and climbed up onto the sacks. You could no longer hear him or the travelling women. There was only the sound of the babbling of water, flowing out from in-between the weeds and mud of the ditch out into the chalky steppes. Not knowing how long we would be waiting there, all of a sudden from the hills across from us we could hear the sound of a truck followed by two headlights. The driver, who was sleeping so soundly one would have thought he wouldn’t wake up to the sound of a cannon, suddenly sprung up, rubbed his eyes, and sat up. I asked him confusedly:

“What happened?”

“Let’s move the truck to the side, a car is coming!”

“How did you hear it?”

“If the world were to crash down I wouldn’t have budged, but the sound of an engine, even my corpse would hear it!”

The car whose lights we had seen passed by us leaving us inside of a huge dust cloud. We were on our way again. The mix gasoline vapor and dust left us in a daze. Six hours later we were still travelling down the road we had been told would take two hours. It was deep into the night. We were scared of sleeping and of leaving the driver unattended.

A short while after going down quite a steep slope I noticed that the driver had almost fallen back asleep and had shaken himself awake and rubbed his eyes. He was looking straight ahead, I too squinted and looked out of the dusty windshield, not able to see a thing.

The vehicle stopped again. The driver spoke in an even more exhausted voice:

“Rahmi!”

My friend reached his hand over my back and poked the driver:

“Forget about it…there is no water in this spring, don’t make the kid get out for nothing…”

Then he turned to me:

“Let’s go, I see Sivas. Before anything happens to us, let’s just start walking!”

We opened the door and got out. In front of the headlights I pulled a lira from my pocket. Then I said to the driver who had collapsed in front of me:

“Take the money!”

He didn’t make a sound. I poked him.

“Come on man, take it…I’m not going until you take it.”

The driver was at pains to lift his head and didn’t seem to be affected at all by my threat. He stretched out his hand like it was carrying a thousand kilo weight.

“Take care gentlemen.”

Stretching out again on the driver’s wheel I saw the green banknote fall to the ground. I slowly closed the door. I looked back at the darkness of the back of the truck full of sugar sacks. Afraid to wake anyone I softly called out

“Rahmi!”

Nobody answered. Not even the smallest motion or sound. The automobile, the living beings it carried, the sugar sacks, and every other part covered in dust, was in a deep sleep. There was only the soft crackling sound of the engine cooling off like the sound of insects crawling over leaves. The headlights were giving off double and triple shadows off of the small rocks spread out on the road in front of it and the light shuddered as though it was taking quick breaths. My friend and I locked arms and headed towards the stray lights of the city in the distance. The light at our back spread our shadows far out in front of us into the endless darkness. Feeling somehow that we could be pulled back into that situation we had just managed to escape, we quickened our steps.