The Water Diviner (16 page)

‘Coffee, sir?’

Hasan raises his head. ‘Yes. Thank you, Sergeant.’

Jemal’s eyes are fixed on the coffee, careful not to spill a drop into the saucer, as he hands it to his major.

‘Health be on your head,
effendi
.’

Hasan responds with the customary reply, ‘Health be on your hands.’

He takes a small sip of the piping-hot drink, savouring the bitter sweetness as it slips down his throat. Hasan sighs, shuts his eyes for a moment.

Further up the beach, a solitary figure stands, shin deep in the shallows, trousers rolled above his knees. Hasan and Jemal watch Connor as he bends and picks up a handful of pebbles and sand, running it through his hands.

‘Are all Australians this stubborn?’

Hasan looks up, following Jemal’s line of sight.

‘It is a matter of national pride for them. You would fit in well there.’

Behind them they hear the crunch of hooves on the beach. The two Turks turn to watch Hilton dismounting his bay mare, leading her over to where the men sit.

‘Not swimming?’

Hasan smiles wryly. ‘We have bathhouses for that.’

‘Sergeant!’ Hilton hails his second-in-command.

Tucker bounds up the beach, stark naked, whippet thin and ungainly. He draws to a halt in front of Hilton.

‘Let’s split the men. I’ll take the Nek, you take half a dozen chaps up to Quinn’s Post.’

Tucker snaps to attention with a textbook click of his waterlogged bare heels, hand raised to his forehead. ‘Sir!’

‘Don’t salute me like that, Sergeant.’

Grabbing a towel, Tucker covers himself and saunters down the beach to rouse the troops.

‘Gordon, Mac, Les, Larry and Len! It’s not Bondi! Rattle your dags. You’re doing Spooks Plateau!’

Hasan looks again at Connor, who is now crouched by the water, chin covered with a thick lather, holding a small mirror in one hand and a razor in the other. ‘What are you doing with your farmer?’

Following his gaze, Hilton winces. ‘He stays here – out of our hair till the supply ship comes.’

‘Maybe we could help him.’

‘You
know
what the chances are of finding his sons.’

‘We have the day they were killed, I know the area.’

‘We both know it – half my regiment is still there, but I couldn’t tell you whose bones are whose. Why tip everything on its ear for one farmer from the Mallee who can’t stay put?’

‘Because he is the only father who has come looking.’

Hilton screws up his face, exasperated. They both know that the major is right; where they choose to dig today is of little consequence – it will make no difference in the scheme of things. Hilton relents, shouting out to Tucker and the motley gang of soldiers now drying themselves on the beach. ‘Sergeant! Change of plan.’

A spent cartridge sits warming in the palm of Connor’s hand, one of the infinite number that wash back and forth in the gentle waves that lap the shore. Hilton stands before him, his fists clamped testily on his hips.

‘There’s a supply ship back to Constantinople in two days; you may stay with us till then.’ Hilton has capitulated, but his tone of voice makes it clear he’s none too happy about it.

‘Two days isn’t enough,’ protests Connor.

‘Two days, two years; whatever it is you are looking for, you won’t find it.’

‘I can find things that other people can’t.’ Connor replies.

‘I hope you can see underground?’

‘Sometimes. I find water, I’m good at that.’

Hilton turns and begins walking back down the beach towards his men. ‘This isn’t water . . . Two days.’

Connor looks up at the escarpment, a glimmer of hope in his eyes.

‘We’ll see,’ he murmurs. ‘We’ll see.’

A line of mounted soldiers snakes along a goat trail, up a gully between a scatter of scrawny bushes and mean grasses. The horses’ hooves turn over clods of dry dirt, exposing lead bullets, the odd tin can and flecks of bone. At the head of the column is Hilton, who rides beside Major Hasan. Jemal rides alone behind them, tugging on the reins and kicking to keep his horse from straying or stopping to gnaw on grass roots.

A string of ten Anzacs follows. Tucker leads with Thomas and Connor riding behind him and Dawson trailing at the rear. As they reach the crest of a ridge they wind past a ghastly monument to the calamity of the campaign – a mound of hundreds of human skulls meticulously stacked like apples on a fruit stand. Beside the pile are neat rows of pelvises, scapulas, femurs, radii and ulnas; a medical student’s dream. Protruding from the hideous collection is a rough wooden sign in Arabic.

Thomas turns to Connor. ‘Don’t worry, mate. Those are Abdul’s. Not ours.’

Connor’s gaze is firmly fixed on Hasan and Hilton. He is offended by the relaxed way in which they converse. As far as he knows, the Turks are the enemy.

Tucker doesn’t take his eyes off the despised Ottoman officer for a moment. The first and last time he shook hands with a Turk was here at Gallipoli, at Johnston’s Jolly. The day – 24 May 1915 – lives in him like an inoperable piece of shrapnel, impossible to dig out. Five days before, the Turks launched a disastrous counterattack on the Anzac line. Turkish bodies were piled up in no-man’s land, so high the Turks had to stop advancing. His .303 was so hot from firing he had to wrap his hand in an undershirt to slide the bolt or remove the clip. The next day both sides agreed on a truce to recover the dead, who had been lying amongst the wild thyme and myrtle for nearly a month, swelling, rotting and liquefying in the spring sun.

The day of the armistice was uncommonly grey and overcast. The whistle sounded at 7.00 am and men on both sides tentatively poked their heads over the sandbags. Before long the land between their lines was teeming with officers and gangs of soldiers spiriting away the dead on stretchers, their faces covered in a vain attempt to mask the stench. Tucker was cutting the ID discs off the corpses and recording their names before they were dropped into shallow graves. Plenty he could put a face to when he read the name etched on the tag.

The day was eerily quiet. It was the only time he recalls the peninsula being silent for any length of time. When he could not sleep in his dugout he used to play a game, timing the interval between gunshots, mortars or artillery. Any sort of ammo fired anywhere along the line – as long as you could hear it – counted. In a perversity peculiar to war he would lie awake hoping for a shot, giving no thought to where the bullet might finish up. Or in whom.

On the day of the truce the officers were tramping up and down the line trying to stop any fraternising with the enemy. Tucker still managed to swap a tin of jam for a green plum, using hand signals. He was so delighted by the fruit that he forgot himself for a moment and shook the young smiling Turk by the hand. While their hands were locked the Turk turned and started spitting Turkish at one of the Australian medics beside him.

Tucker and his mates had always been a bit dubious about John James, who spoke a bit of Turkish and wore an Ottoman medal on his chest like some morbid souvenir. The Turks took offence at this too, crying bloody murder and accusing him of looting from a dead hero.

James was indignant, explaining in broken Turkish that he had earned the Sultan’s Award for fighting shoulder- to-shoulder with the Turks against the Russians a few years earlier. Watching James and the Turks shaking hands and kissing cheeks made Tucker realise what an imprecise gesture a handshake is, and he vowed never to bother with it again. When 4.00 pm came that day, they all clambered back into their trenches to start killing one another again.

Connor breaks into Tucker’s reverie. ‘Who is the Turk? What’s he doing here?’

Tucker turns and speaks under his breath. ‘That’s “Hasan the Assassin” – saw us land, saw us off. The dog wiped out half my battalion, including my brother. He would’ve killed your sons, for sure.’

In an instant Connor has spurred his horse with a swift kick to the flanks. Just as the horse takes off, Thomas reaches out and grabs a fistful of its bridle, and reins both horse and rider in.

He has obviously caught the gist of the conversation. ‘Whoa there, you two. Where are you going? We’re all best mates now. I get to serve the Major breakfast every morning. I always add a bit of Anzac allspice.’ By way of illustration, Thomas hacks up a spit ball and fires it onto the ground beside Connor.

Tucker watches Connor settle but can see the Australian father is emotionally charged. The enemy now has a face, a target for the years of pent up anger and grief. Like the jam tin grenades that Tucker and his brother used to hurl at the Turkish line, Connor was set to explode without warning.

T
he loose chain of horsemen winds around the rim of an enormous mine crater and up the adjacent ridge.

‘Wouldn’t have wanted to be standing here when that went off,’ Tucker calls over his shoulder to no one in particular.

At the summit the party reins to a halt near a fledgling Turkish pine. The scraggly tree stands four foot high with its thirsty limbs hanging limply, most of its needles lying about the base of its trunk.

‘Gentlemen . . . the Lone Pine,’ Tucker announces.

‘Not the original?’ asks the gullible Dawson.

‘That one was blown halfway to Brisbane during the battle,’ answers Tucker as he empties his canteen at the base of the tree. ‘More like Son of Lone Pine.’

‘We call this place Kanli Sirt. Bloody Ridge,’ Hasan says quietly. ‘There was a whole forest here before.’

They all struggle to picture it as they look out over the grim plateau of tangled barbed wire, eviscerated sandbags, collapsed trenches and, everywhere, grim bone fragments sprinkled across the landscape like shredded coconut on a cake. Hilton dismounts and notes that there is not a bush or clump of grass growing that would reach the top of his leggings.

In the distance there is a rudimentary obelisk fashioned by the Turkish survivors of Lone Pine from concrete and spent artillery shells. A memorial to their friends who lie in the mass graves on the fringes of the battlefield.

‘Do you remember much detail?’ Hilton asks Hasan.

‘Unfortunately. No one who fought here will forget it,’ says Hasan without explanation.

He stands up in the saddle and looks into a series of trenches, framed with rotting sandbags and eroded by the flash floods over winter.

‘That was our front line there,’ he tells Hilton, and then jabs his heels into his horse’s ribs and trots towards it. Jemal pulls alongside him, looking unsettled. Clearly this is not a place he wants to revisit.

‘It can’t be worse than the last time,’ Hasan assures him with a smile.

‘No. But scabs will still bleed if you pick them.’

Connor watches the two Turks and fights a rising wave of resentment. His anger, originally directed at a nebulous beast called ‘The Turk’, is now keenly focused on the man he has already begun to think of as the ‘Assassin’. The enemy has a face, and every time Hasan smiles it is another bullet in the memory of Connor’s boys. In his more rational moments, Connor can distinguish between war and murder. But since arriving on the peninsula, those moments have become few and far between, and more often than not he feels as if he is thrashing around in a dim well somewhere, grappling for a slippery rope.

Hilton, standing beside Connor’s horse, sees the farmer’s grim expression and accurately reads his thoughts. ‘It’s strange to think of him as something other than the enemy,’ he says in a low voice. He swings back into the saddle. ‘Takes a bit of getting used to.’

Connor can’t imagine becoming accustomed to it, ever.