He sat on the balcony, the night caressing his face. Her warmth was against his back. The dog nestled against his legs. Major Karim Aziz let the conceit play in his mind, and shield him from the future.
‘Did you see him?’ the woman asked.
‘I saw him.’
He had been thinking of trophies, the heads that hunters set on walls. It would be talked about. Young men, not yet old enough to know of war, would gather in the quiet of barracks’ corridors and speak of a duel to the death. He had wrapped the obsession around him, a cloak against the night. He had not thought of the brigadier, the Boot, with the nails torn from his hands, the blood seeping from the flab of his face, the burns of electrodes and cigarettes on his body, the names hidden in a tortured mind.
‘Was he well?’
‘I saw him very briefly.’
‘He will be tired – I tell him he works too hard. Will I see him when they hang her?’
‘I think not, I don’t think he will be there.’
The bell had woken her. She had come to the door with a light in her face that was washed out when she had seen he was not her lover. He had gone through to the bedroom balcony and squatted down with his dog. He could see up the length of Martyr Avenue.
He had no plan of what he would do afterwards. The duel was the present, and the anticipation of it, like some narcotic, overwhelmed him. She had come outside, sat on the cold tiles of the balcony, and leaned her back against his.
‘Are you from Kirkūk, Major?’
‘Baghdad.’
‘You have a wife there?’
‘In Baghdad, yes. She will be sleeping now – she will have had a long day.’
She would have waited for him from the middle of the day through to the end and then, cursing him, she would have ordered the boys back into the car and she would have driven back down the long road to Ba’qūbah, and then on to Baghdad and home. She would have thrown the packed bags into their room and the children’s bedroom, and gone into the kitchen to make a meal. Later, because he had not met her at the fuel station, the door of their home would be sledgehammered open and the house would be defiled by the boots of strangers. He had made a choice and he lived with it.
‘And children?’
‘Two sons. One has an important examination at school today, and the younger one has a football match tomorrow. They are fine boys.’
‘And proud of their father?’
‘I have to hope so.’
The boys would have sat sullen and quiet in the car during the journey home. They would not have understood why their father had not come or why they had made the journey in the first place. Perhaps their mother would have attempted to turn their mood with talk of school or football, and perhaps she would have spoken of the importance of their father’s work. Perhaps she would have said nothing, bitten her lip and blinked into the blazing lights of the oncoming lorries going north. When the door was broken down, when their mother was beaten by the strangers, when the house was stripped and searched, his sons would be told that their father was a traitor. His choice was dictated by his vanity.
‘Why are you here, Major?’
‘To kill a man.’
‘Because he is your enemy?’
‘No,’ he said absently.
She pressed, ‘Because he is the enemy of the state?’
‘Not the reason.’
‘Because he has hurt you?’
‘He has not hurt me.’
All he knew of the man was from the one distant sighting, distorted by the mirage over the open ground, and always beyond the range of the Dragunov. He knew nothing of him.
He did not know where the man had come from, or why he had travelled, or of his life.
After he had killed the man, he would not stand over his body and pose as a hunter would over the corpse of a bear or a wolf or a leopard, but he would kneel in a moment of reverence and hope they shared a god, and close the lids of the dead eyes. Then, and only then, he would think of afterwards.
‘How do you know he will come?’
‘He will come, he has to. He is a driven man, as am I. We are equals. I respect him, and I believe he gives me respect.’
His eyes traversed the many windows of Martyr Avenue, and the roofs, and he waited for the dawn.
Three hours before first light Gus and Omar started out and headed for the glow of the street lamps and the flame.
‘She did not know her place. She treated me as if I were inferior. In front of many who could watch and listen she behaved as if I were subordinate to her. I tell you, Haquim, even if I had influence, if I was listened to in Baghdad, I would not lift a finger on her behalf. But that is idle talk because it’s not the truth. She is, and you know it, beyond reach. It is my duty now, as a leader of my people, to protect them. I will fulfil my duty, I will negotiate with the President. I can do nothing else. She deluded you. Go home, forget her. Go and sit in the sunlight in front of your house, and put her from your mind.
You will excuse me, I am tired, I wish to go to my bed.’
‘You disgrace yourself if you do nothing.’
‘She climbed too fast.’
The agha Bekir rose from his chair. The silk robe swirled around his body. Behind the sweet words and the wringing hands, Haquim could see detestation for the young woman who had taken him to the edge of Kirkūk. His feet, snug in light embroidered slippers, slid across the floor towards the inner door. Haquim thought the bastard would sleep well.
He felt old, weary, and the dusty uniform clung to his body. The double doors behind him were opened silently: the audience was concluded.
Haquim went out of the building and into the night that had fallen heavy on Sulaymānīyah. His last effort for her had won no reward.
He drove away towards the dark lines of the mountains where the air was clean, where he could still dream of the city that had been their goal, and the flame.
Meda walked into the cell, the door rattled shut behind her and the boots went away down the corridor.
She had been woken, taken to a room where harsh lights burned, read a statement from a typed sheet of paper, then wheeled round and marched back to the cell. She was alone, and when the boots had gone there was only the quiet around her. She sagged to her knees, crawled to the hole, put her mouth close to it and whispered, in a small voice, that she was to be hanged at dawn. She asked for him to hold her hand till dawn came. She heard his laboured breathing. She reached with her arm deep into the drain but in a moment of respite he slept and did not take her hand. She did not shout into the hole to rouse him, did not cry for him, because she thought it would be cruel to wake him. It was many hours since she had heard the rifle fired, and she looked up at the high window where the stars were and she did not know how long it would be until the light dismissed them.
‘My colleague, Dr Williams, did most of the talking and I did most of the listening. Fred, that’s Dr Williams, wanted a witness. Fair enough – it’s not every day a civilian comes in off the street to learn about the Iraqi armed forces. It could have been a can of worms for Fred if he’d turned out to be a mercenary, looking for kicks from killing people, so I sat in.’
It was still dark outside the building. Ken Willet could hear the chatter in other offices of the early-morning work of the cleaners, muffled by the Hoovers. He knew the block, Centre for War Studies, from his own years at the Royal Military Academy, but the psychiatrist had not been there at that time. Rupert Helps had pleaded a busy day, a first lecture at 8 a.m. then a filled, sacrosanct diary, and an evening engagement. Dr Williams was at NATO in Belgium for the week, but the psychiatrist had heard – on a routine visit to the Commando Training Centre at Lympstone – of the interest in Augustus Henderson Peake and had offered his help. Willet would have bet that Rupert Helps would have run barefoot over broken glass to help.
Ms Manning asked, ‘What did Dr Williams tell him?’
‘I didn’t listen that closely – Fred’s the expert, you see. We h
ear it every lunchtime in the mess, his views on the Iraqi armed forces – myself, I think he’s slightly overrated.
Anyway, a résumé to give an idea of the usual lecture. The Iraqis are a defensively minded and centralized military machine. Faced with the unexpected, they will be slow to react because middle-ranking officers are not able to take field decisions. So, at first, they can be caught out, lose ground and positions. Once they’ve steadied their nerve and had orders from on high they are efficient. That was the germ of it – a sudden attack will make early advances, then there will be a regrouping, consolidation, counter-attack …
then reprisals. I don’t think he’d thought of that. He was jolted. I’d wager my shirt on Fred having the right appraisal of that scenario, but it is pretty obvious. The insurgents –
Kurds, yes? – would go through villages and towns, and think they were a force of liberation, but God help the poor bastards who cheered them. It’s the same through history – do you know your ‘Forty-five rebellion? The Young Pretender marched south and took Carlisle, Lancaster, Manchester, and idiots cheered him to the roof, but they were backing a loser. There’s always some nasty little creature who remembers who cheered the liberators loudest, who is going to dangle from a rope when the tables are turned – there were a great number of hangings in those northern English cities when the Highland army retreated … Back in Iraq, the same is true – the reprisals would be brutal.
He went very quiet, like the wind was out of his sails. Fred told him about the terrain he’d be in, a little about how to cope with hunger, thirst, lack of sleep, heat. Then I chipped in.’
‘What exactly was your contribution?’ Willet asked drily. He had taken a fast and certain dislike to the psychiatrist. Perhaps it was the time in the morning, dawn not yet on them, perhaps it was the man’s flamboyant bow-tie of vivid green and primrose yellow, perhaps it was the long hair gathered at the back of his head with an elastic band.
‘If I’d reckoned him a mere psychopath, I’d have stayed quiet.’
Willet persisted, ‘What would interest a psychiatrist like you?’
Rupert Helps beamed, and preened pleasure at being asked for his expert opinion.
‘He’s not a rounded man. I assessed him as an innocent, rather juvenile – a child, unwilling to grow up and shed a world of romance, but decent. You with me? Peter Pan syndrome. The talk of reprisals was the give-away.’
‘Sorry, but you haven’t told me what your contribution was.’
‘I told him to forget it. He should nurse his own problems and ignore other people’s difficulties. I said he should put himself first.’
Ms Manning gazed into the psychiatrist’s face. ‘Did you expand on that opinion?’
‘You know—’
‘No, certainly I don’t.’ Willet thought she was a cat, about to pounce, ready for the kill.
‘Be so kind as to tell me.’
‘Well, because he seemed to be searching for fulfilment, I suggested he should push at work for promotion, never said what his job was. I didn’t gather that he was in a very meaningful relationship – he could put more effort into that. He should find a hobby and develop it further. He could move home, get a garden, have a larger mortgage and therefore self-inflict the pressure to earn more through greater endeavour. If he needed to do good works I told him to drive at weekends for the elderly or the sick … I was trying to help. Did he go?’
She said brutally, ‘Oh, yes, he went, completely ignored you.’
‘Has he survived?’
The steel was in her voice. ‘We don’t know. We have very little access to intelligence from that region. Tomorrow I have a meeting at which I may find something out. Isn’t there more to living than work, loving, hobbies, mortgages, charities? Shouldn’t we rejoice that one man, alone among the dross, climbs towards further horizons?’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘What don’t I understand?’
‘If he survives, he’ll be damaged. He won’t win, can’t. Should he make it back, he’ll be a damaged, altered man. I was just trying to help, damn you. He can’t win, and it will all be for nothing – dead or damaged.’
She rose imperiously, ‘Thank you. Perhaps that’s a worthwhile sacrifice. Come on.’
Willet followed her out. They passed a column of cadets starting out on a cross-country run.
‘The pompous bastard didn’t even offer us coffee, gets us out of bed as though he’s the only one with an important day, and no bloody coffee,’ he said. ‘Well done for putting him down, laying him out on the floor like that.’
‘Don’t patronize me.’
It was a brilliant dawn of ochre and gold and red thrown up from behind the mountains in the west. The dawn was a flame to which two men were drawn.
Chapter Seventeen
‘Will you send my body back to the mountains?’
The commander seemed to ponder that last request. They were in her cell, the door open behind him. He seemed to think on it as if he were slightly confused. He had taken no part in the stripping of her military clothes, and army boots, and had looked to the ceiling when she was naked, before the smock of white cotton was lifted over her head and her arms were threaded into the sleeves. She was calm, stiff and awkward but he had heard on the speakers in the office the mewling of the wretch in the adjacent cell and he had heard the last faint words of comfort she had given him. Most men, officers in the army, asked for a cigarette and panted on it before it was taken from their mouths, discarded on the cell’s floor and they were led out. The cigarettes lay on the floor half-smoked, still burning by the time the execution had been completed. He would not have admitted to being a man invested with cruelty, but he was keen on the bureaucracy entailed in his work as a shield to the state.
He looked into Meda’s face. Her hair was held close against her head with a cloth bandanna. He could understand why men had followed her. If the shield he held was lowered, if the regime became vulnerable, if he – himself – were about to be led out, he would not be given an opportunity to make a last request. There would be sons, fathers, uncles and nephews, cousins of those he had sent to their deaths that the regime might survive, crowding around him and kicking, punching, spitting. No cigarette would be lit for him before he was lifted up under the lamp-post or the telegraph pole. He thought of what she asked. If the regime fell he knew what would become of his beloved grandchildren. It was her very calmness that disturbed him.
He answered her quietly, ‘I promise your body will be sent back to the mountains …’
‘Thank you.’
‘… when your family have paid the price of the rope.’
There was a titter of laughter from the men who held her and fastened the thong on her wrists behind her back. He had sought to destroy the calm, but her eyes were unwavering and beading into his. He saw the contempt, and understood better why men had followed her – and why agha Ibrahim in Arbīl and agha Bekir had not lifted the telephone and pleaded with Baghdad for her life. He broke the hold of her eyes and looked at the wall where other wretches had written their names and the dates on which they had been taken from the cell, but noticed that she had not bothered to do so.
‘It is time,’ he said brusquely. ‘Move her.’
They took her out quickly and her feet, in plain plastic sandals, scraped the floor. They dragged her from his sight.
He heard her cry out in the corridor, ‘Be strong, friend, be brave. Remember those who depend on you …’
He thought that one of the escort would then have clamped a hand over her mouth. He heard their boots and the scrape of her sandals, then the squeal of the unlocking of the cell block’s outer door and the clang as it was shut again.
There was a deep, limitless silence around him. He stood alone in the cell and the walls seemed to close around him, the ceiling to slide down on him. He saw the high window, the grime on the glass that repulsed the brightness of the low sunlight, and the bulb that burned dully above the
protective screen of wire. An hour before he had come to the cell to see her stripped, dressed in the white cotton smock that was too large for her, made for a man, which had been soiled with the excrement of the last traitor whose bowels had burst as he had kicked under the rope, he had been telexed from the al-Rashid barracks. A general of mechanized infantry, commanding a division, had crossed the Jordanian frontier and had reached Amman. A brigadier of anti-aircraft artillery defences, and two colonels of the Engineer Corps – with their families – had fled their homes. A colonel in an armoured regiment had driven his car into the cover of trees beside the Tigris river, sealed the windows, squeezed a pipe on to the exhaust and was dead … There would be others, there always were. A few escaped, but others stayed, believed it was possible to disguise their guilt from him, the shield of the regime.
The quiet burdened him, and the emptiness of the cell. Her calm had made the silence that seemed to crush him. He could not escape the gaze of her eyes. He felt the weakness at his knees and he would have fallen had he not reached out and steadied himself against the door of the cell. He had seen many men taken from the cells, and afterwards he had gone to the home of his son and sat the children on his knee and told them stories or played with them with their toys on the rugs, but that morning he was far from his son’s home and his grandchildren. He staggered out of the cell and leaned, breathless, against the corridor wall.
Holding the Zero Page 36
