Holding the Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘There were stories and books and pictures, but it was too far away to be real. There were letters sent to my grandfather, by your grandfather, but they had no value, no context in anything I knew. Then I came with him to the border. We found his friend, and we found you. You never cried. All around you was screaming and weeping, despair.

  You had just buried your brothers. You hung back, somehow apart from the misery around you. I had never seen before, have never seen again, a young face of such determination. You were not more than a child, you never spoke, but I saw your face.

  Whatever else in my life goes on past me, that face is always with me … I may not be good with words, but I am blessed for having known you, given me from old men’s friendship. Do you think we are close now to the old men, near to Nineveh?’

  ‘I think we are.’

  ‘I came because that face, without tears, enabled me to dream and to dare.’

  He sat on the ground. He pulled her down beside him. A shell whined high over them and exploded in the distance on the road. He felt the light wind, medium strength but coming on to fresh, on his face, and she shuddered. He hesitated, then slipped his arm over her shoulder. Gus knew it was not the cold that made the shudder in her body.

  Together, his arm around her shoulder, they could dream, dare. He pulled her harder against him, her shoulder under his, her hair against his cheek, her hips against his, her thigh … She cried out in pain. She was so strong, so proud, so bloody obstinate, and he had forgotten. He took the torch from his pocket. He did not speak. He pushed her back onto the dirt, and his hand went to her belt. He unfastened it and dragged down her trouser zip. He heaved the trousers down and shone the torch onto her thigh. The dressing was gone, and the edge of the wound was reddened and angry. Maggots moved in the centre of it, between the weals that marked its limits. He saw the wriggling life of the maggots. He crouched over her thigh, smelt the dankness of her, and very carefully began to pick each of the maggots from the wound. She did not cry out again. He poured water from his bottle over the wound and washed away the newest of the flies’ eggs. He did not criticize her for not having had the wound dressed, for not having stolen the time of the aid-worker at Tarjil while she’d worked to save the worst of the casualties. He loved her because, under the bombast of her conceit, she would never put herself first, and never complain for fear that her strength was diminished. He made the wound clean. He switched off the torch, lifted her buttocks, drew up her trousers and zipped them, then fastened her belt.

  He did not think it was necessary to fumble for words to explain why he had stayed.

  He saw the great flame burning and beyond it were the roofs, minarets and the high buildings of Kirkūk. He could dream and he could dare, because of her. He kissed her. It was a slow, awkward kiss, lip to lip, mouth to mouth, the kiss of teenage children in wonderment.

  They walked back into the camp, away from Nineveh.

  She called briskly for a briefing meeting in fifteen minutes, and the shyness was gone from her.

  There was a jeep parked near to one of the fires and Gus saw Haquim beside it.

  Haquim said, ‘As you could not leave her, neither could I, though it was the act of a fool to come back.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To be with her, and to tell you about helicopters …’

  ‘You didn’t have to come back – I know about helicopters.’

  ‘And to shield her, to keep her safe from herself.’

  Gus settled comfortably against the jeep’s wheel. The boy brought them coffee. Only when he drank it did he lose the taste of her mouth in his, but still he did not forget.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Away to the west, the flame burned, an isolated beacon beyond the myriad lights in Kirkūk.

  They went fast over flat, open ground. If they looked for cover, went forward at a crawl, they would not make their schedule. If he had not believed in her, he would have turned.

  The route, Omar leading and Gus a pace behind, would take them in a great arcing circuit around the city’s lights. Going hard, Gus could not avoid kicking loose stones and sometimes stumbling into small ditches. He took on trust, too, the boy’s skills and the sharpness of his hearing. He had known at home, as a child, out with Billings, the night flight of the hunting barn owl and learned its skills, the sharpness of its hearing as it phantom-glided in the new plantations, listening for the movements of tiny voles and shrews. He thought the boy had the skills and hearing of the owl. The schedule allowed no slack. His own stride was heavy, scuffing the ground, but the boy was as silent as the owl when the old poacher had showed it him.

  It was two hours since they had left what remained of the main column. There were isolated lights to their left, lamps over a fence, a roving searchlight from a silhouetted watchtower, and a dull glow from the tightly packed homes. Omar’s route would bring them between the fortified village and the more distant spread of Kirkūk’s brightness.

  He heard a shrill cry.

  Omar never wavered from the route, as if it carried no threat to them.

  The crying was pain, that of a rabbit in a snare.

  A track crossed the dark ground ahead and linked a Victory City to Kirkūk. The sound of the crying grew, but the boy did not slow.

  They came to the track, crossed it, stepped down into the ditch on the far side of it and Gus straddled the source of the crying. The woman was a black shadow shape. The thin moonlight fell on the beads of her necklace and caught the irregular shape of her teeth, the lines on her face, made jewelled rivers of her tears.

  The men were dumped in grotesque postures in the pit of the ditch. Omar, ahead of Gus, shuddered – as if ghosts crossed his soul – and the woman’s cries turned to a ranted anguish. The smaller body wore a Hard Rock Café T-shirt, but the motif was stained in black blood. The moonlight caught the lustreless eyes of the heavier man. She shouted at them as they went by, and after them as they hurried away. Her shouts seemed to hang in the night air like a thinning mist. They went on until they no longer heard the sound.

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘I do not think you wish to know, Mr Gus.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  In his mind were the bodies, perhaps her husband and son. The face he had seen was aged with suffering. He told himself that it was right to go on, not give sympathy and help. He heard Omar draw in a great gulp of breath, then the whisper of his voice.

  ‘She went into the fields the day before yesterday and she found wild flowers. She brought the flowers home. She is a widow and she lives with her son, her son’s wife and her grandson. She put the flowers in a jar that had been used for storing jam. She set the jar and the flowers outside the door of her house. She told the people who lived near to her that, yesterday, they should collect flowers as a celebration because the woman, Meda, was coming to bring them freedom. The soldiers did nothing because they, also, Mr Gus, believed that Meda was coming. Then they heard that the peshmerga had turned, had gone back to the mountains. They are survivors, Mr Gus. They denounced her, her son and her grandson as followers of the witch. She said the whole village walked with them, abusing them, when the soldiers took them out of the village and shot them. She curses Meda. She says that if Meda had stayed in her own village, in the mountains, then she would have her son and her grandson. She wanted us to bury her son and grandson …

  Are you better for knowing that?’

  His heel hurt worse, his body ached with tiredness, there was the growing pain in his eyes from peering into the darkness and, ceaselessly, his stomach growled for food. He, too, had put his trust in her. They walked on. The sling of his rifle bit into the flesh of his shoulder, freshening the sores of the rucksack’s straps, and he welcomed it.

  The boy pleaded, a child’s voice, ‘Tell me, Mr Gus, a story from Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard.’

  He should have remained silent, should have concentrated on his footfall, but there was rare fear in the boy’s voice. He should hav
e been thinking of the schedule, and the helicopters.

  Gus said softly, ‘Major Hesketh-Prichard wrote that the best scout he ever knew was an American called Burnham who fought as an officer with the British army in the war against the Matabele tribes of Rhodesia in southern Africa, and that was more than a hundred years ago. He was awarded the medal of the Distinguished Service Order by the Queen. He was a small man but always very physically fit. He had good hearing and strong eyesight, and his sense of smell was remarkable – as sensitive as any animal’s. His finest achievement was to go with his rifle through the entire Matabele army, alone, past their sentries, past their patrols, right into the centre of their camp. In the middle of the camp he found the tent of their leader, M’limo, and Burnham shot him dead. Then he was excellent enough in his fieldcraft to go back through their lines to safety. He was the best

  …’

  ‘It is a good story, Mr Gus.’

  ‘Only the best, Omar, can go through the lines, kill the heart of the enemy, and go back to safety.’

  ‘But the fault was with the Matabele people who did not protect their leader.’

  ‘Fail to protect the leader, Omar, and everything is wasted.’

  Their stride quickened in the cloak of darkness. The minutes of the schedule given them were slowly being eaten away.

  His mind was made up. It was not duty that drove Major Karim Aziz, but vanity.

  In the night hours he searched, as he had many weeks before – a lifetime before – for a vantage-point.

  Because he had fought before in the streets, cellars and sewers, Aziz knew the pulse of a city at war, but that night the mood of Kirkūk perplexed him. He would have expected the city’s people to have retreated behind barred doors and shuttered windows, that every shop would be padlocked and closed, that the street sellers would have gone to the shanty town beyond the airfield. But the lights burned out over the wide boulevard streets of the New Quarter, and there were still cars and commercial trucks on them, with the tanks and personnel carriers. The cafés, too, were doing trade, and at the pavement tables men sat in thick coats and smoked, drank and talked.

  He knew she must come at dawn, and the sniper with her. With a small force, she would have gained a toehold, or at least a fingernail grip, on the centre of the city where the big buildings of the administration were sited. If she were not coming then she would have joined the long, dusty convoy he had seen retreating from the crossroads. Vanity was his spur, as it had been when the troops had cheered him after he had shot the mullah many years before. The same vanity, not duty to his family, his army and his country, had sent him on the hunt for a vantage-point that would have given him the shot of a lifetime on the flat roof with the view of the door of a villa. The vanity obscured the image of the brigadier in the cell block from his thoughts.

  He strode away from the governor’s house and the gate into Fifth Army headquarters.

  He was certain that she would attack down the width of Martyr Avenue towards the house and the headquarters. He was refreshed by the rest on his bed and he had eaten bread, a little cheese and an apple. The dog was close to him. It was a week since he had shaved. The dust and mud clung to his boots, his trousers and his smock; the backpack, perched high on his shoulders, was grimed in filth; but there was brightness in his eyes, and in the lens of the sight mounted on the stock of the Dragunov. When he passed the cafés, the men stopped their talk, lowered their cups and held their cigarettes away from their mouths as if drawn by the sight of him. He walked towards the outskirts of the city, and visualized the battle and the part he would play in it … She would make the punch down the six lanes of Martyr Avenue, with a small diversionary assault on the parallel 16th July Avenue that was four lanes wide. The helicopters would be up and over them, would scatter them. She would be in a doorway, or in the flood-drain in the centre of Martyr Avenue, but if she were to lead, she must show herself.

  There was a doorman at the entrance to the last block of apartments on Martyr Avenue.

  He walked past the man, who bowed his head, the dirt from his boots flaking on the lobby carpet, and climbed the stairs. He emerged onto the roof and stood in the shadow of the water tank.

  Aziz looked out over the vista beneath him. Behind him, on the far side of the city, was the glow of the lights of the airfield from which the helicopters would fly. To the side, set in a shambles and without pattern, were the pinpricks of the Old Quarter. In front of him was Martyr Avenue, the barricade and two tanks with personnel carriers behind them.

  Beyond Martyr Avenue were two neat lines of apartment blocks, then the sharply illuminated length of 16th July Avenue. When he swivelled further he could see the plaza outside the governor’s house, and at the end of it was the floodlit gate to Fifth Army headquarters. His search for a vantage-point was completed … But he was too high, the elevation was too great. For a moment longer, as if he had earned a little of its luxury, he let the night air play, cool and cleansing, on the stubble of his face and the dirt. Then he whistled for the dog and went back to the staircase, down three flights of steps.

  The door on the second floor had no nameplate. He rang the bell, kept his finger on the button.

  A bolt was drawn back, a key was turned. He saw a momentary joy on her face, then the shock. Without explanation, Aziz pushed her aside, kicking the door shut behind him with his heel.

  She wore a loose housecoat and fluffy slippers. There was make-up on her face but insufficient to hide the crow’s feet lines at her eyes and mouth – his wife, in his home, did not use cosmetics because they could not be paid for. She had blond, short-cut hair, but the stems were grey-black below the platinum. He went through the living room, past the chairs and tables and lamps – more expensive than they could have afforded to buy –and into the soft-lit bedroom. There was a big bed, with pink sheets and blankets, and a padded headboard, such as he and his wife had never slept in. He pulled aside the drawn curtains and stepped through the French windows onto the balcony. He could see the edge of the airfield perimeter, the Old Quarter and the barricade at the end of Martyr Avenue. Through the apartment blocks was a clear view of long sectors of 16th July Avenue. It was a corner apartment and there was an additional balcony off the living room from which he would be able to look over the square outside the governor’s house and the gates to Fifth Army. He went back into the bedroom, and gazed at the photograph in the frame on the dressing table.

  The face smiled above the uniformed shoulders.

  It was the face he had seen, cold and evaluating, when he had fired on the range and in the mountains too. He picked up the photograph of the brigadier. The face, bloodied and scarred, was now in the cell block. His hand shook as he laid the photograph face down on the dressing table.

  ‘You know him? He is very kind to me. To me, he is a gentle man …’

  He told her to close the bedroom door and switch off the light.

  ‘He did not come last night. I thought, just now, that you were him …’

  When the room was darkened, Aziz dragged back the curtains and fastened them at the sides of the window. He went to the bed, ripped off the pink coverlet and threw it onto the balcony.

  ‘I am from Malmö in Sweden. I have been in London, Paris, Nicosia, Bucharest, Beirut, Cairo and Baghdad, and now I am in Kirkūk. I am very lucky to have found such a kind and gentle man at the end of my road. I suppose that he is busy with the situation –but you know better than me that he is important.’

  He settled himself down on the coverlet, used it as padding so that the hard tiles of the balcony would not stiffen his legs, reduce the circulation and harm the accuracy of his shooting.

  ‘And he has told me that soon he will be more important …’

  He told her to leave him and to take her photograph with her. The peace of his mind was fracturing. He watched for the woman and the sniper. Because he had put vanity above duty to his family, his life depended on the man in the cell block.

  ‘We sho
uld go in one group.’

  ‘No, we must be in small groups,’ Meda said.

  Haquim smacked his knuckle into the palm of his hand. ‘We need to be a fist and punch with firepower.’

  ‘We should be water running through fingers, in groups of twenty, no more.’

  ‘Strength in numbers is our only option,’ Haquim persisted.

  ‘We should attack from all angles so they do not know where to find the heart of us.’

  The men, 280 of them – fewer than the number needed to take the Victory City, far fewer than the number who had charged the defences at Tarjil – stood in a tight, mesmerized circle around her and Haquim. It was as if she held them in a noose. In the moonlight, he saw the adoration in their eyes. He knew some of them as thieves, and some of them as beggars. Some were so old they could barely run and others were so young they could not have done a day of man’s work in the fields. The best men, the men on whom the mustashar would have depended, had gone back with agha Ibrahim and agha Bekir, as he had … but, unlike him, none of the best men had returned. They would be slaughtered, all of them – her and him – when the helicopters flew. He thought she had sacrificed the life of the Englishman, used an old loyalty, sent him on the long march against the helicopters and killed him.