Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

His host passed the glass of Saudi champagne. It was done awkwardly, and the man's heavily strapped wrist restricted any fluency of movement. Bart smiled, took the glass. He thought his host would have preferred a sling, as if it were a Purple Heart ribbon, but Bart had decreed that a tightly wrapped bandage was appropriate. It was only a sprain. By way of reward for coming across Riyadh at the speed appropriate for an emergency, he had been invited to an all-American picnic. It was not permitted to barbecue in the park of the diplomatic quarter, but the host's wife had cooked the beefburgers in her villa kitchen, had wrapped them well in tinfoil, and they were still warm. The talk bustled round him, and Bart thought he was expected to look and feel privileged to be present.

'I don't know where this country is going, except down. I don't see a future here. Once they got it into their thick skulls that they could do without us, without Americans, when they'd got that delusion into their heads, they were going nowhere but down the pan.

'What really sucks is the absence of gratitude. I have spent ten whole years here, eleven come Thanksgiving, and I have never heard a Saudi say that he is grateful for what we have done in their country.

All right, they have oil. All right, so we want the oil. At every stage we have shown them how to exploit and market that asset. Up to last year we have posted the finest young men and women in our armed forces here, let them live out there in the desert, for the protection of the regime. I ask you, did you ever hear any thanks? Arabic for

"thank you", I'm using it from morning to night, is shukran, and I don't hear it said to me much. You know, in 'ninety-one we fought a war to stop this place ending up as an out-station of Baghdad, and we get no gratitude.'

Bart seldom met Americans. They inhabited their own compounds. They used their own Chamber of Commerce, had their own fenced-off section of the grandstand at the races. Insularity was the name of their game. These men, Bart accepted it, were not fools.

Bombastic, yes. Arrogant, yes. Stupid, no.

'They are living in denial. Their heads are in the sand. They're the source of Al Qaeda, they bankrolled that gang of fanatics, zealots, psychopaths. I read that think-tank report from back home. Quote:

"For years, individuals and charities based in Saudi Arabia have been the most important source of funds for Al Qaeda, and for years Saudi officials have turned a blind eye to the problem." Unquote.

You wait till that nine/eleven law case gets up steam. You remember what that Pentagon briefer called this virtuous and God-following Kingdom: he called it a "kernel of evil". What I say – who needs Saudi Arabia? We got Iraq, we don't need these people. We're the power, they're nothing. They sowed the field, let them harvest it.'

His mind drifted. The condemnations and criticisms wafted around the linen tablecloth. Food filled the mouths, the best that could be bought in the supermarkets of the Riyadh shopping malls.

He thought they rolled out this talk each time they met, yet still retained a fervour for it. If the place was such shit, why stay? Bart reckoned they stayed because the money was good, and because they were, one and all, too proud to consider that the Al Qaeda crowd – the fanatics, zealots, psychopaths – could make them scuttle for the airport. Why did he stay? Bart half choked on the end of his burger. Maybe it took more courage to run. Bart could have torn up the airline ticket, not caught the flight to Tel Aviv, could have refused to get into the waiting car, could not have checked into the Dan Hotel and settled himself into a room with a beach view. To stand against the wind took more bottle than flowing with it. An Englishman had come first, had thanked him on behalf of a medical charity, whose name and background Bart assumed had been cobbled together in the last week. The Englishman had eczema on his wrists, and the signs of over-high blood pressure – Bart was good on symptoms – and a nasal voice. 'What I heard, you were looking for a route back to respectability, old boy. I can put you on that route, but I promise that travelling on it might be bumpy… In my sort of work, I trade.

I do a friend a favour, and I know I'll get a favour back. Let's call you the favour. You are the favour I'm doing for a friend.' Bart could have walked out then, but it would have taken more guts than he had. An hour after the Englishman had left him, while he'd been watching the swimmers on the beach, there had been a knock on the door. He had met Ariel. Ariel was cheerful, bouncy, had the happy enthusiasm that made problems disappear. It would have taken a better man than Bart to refuse Ariel. After the burgers, flushed down with the bogus champagne, the wives sliced portions of apple pie, crowned them with dollops of soft-scoop vanilla ice cream from the cold box, and the venom gathered strength around him.

'What I can't stand is the corruption – nothing's transparent – the skimmers, the pay-offs, back-handers, and the middle-men's cuts.'

'I can live with that. The stone in my shoe is the waste, the extravagance – you know what it cost the last time the old king went for his summer vacation to Spain? Three million dollars a day, believe me.'

'If they don't learn, and fast, a truckload of humility, one day they'll wake up and find we're gone. Then you'll hear some hollering.'

The host's wife smiled at him, like it was outside church and everyone felt good. 'You haven't said much, Dr Bartholomew.'

There was much he could have said, but Bart chose the easy path, 'Been enjoying myself too much. Wonderful food, fantastic hospitality, couldn't have been bettered.'

*

Al Maz'an village, near Jenin, Occupied West Bank.

He saw the blood drip down and felt the guilt.

The best house in the village, on the central square, was an older building. It would have been constructed before the Second World War, perhaps by a merchant, and it represented a long-gone prosperity in the Palestinian community. Before Bart had arrived to work in the village, the building had been a target for Israeli tank shells during an armoured incursion. Now, extraordinarily, the family that had long ago scattered from the West Bank and had made money in the United States of America had sent funds for the restoration of the building and had pledged it to the village as a centre for local administration, adult education and for a communal meeting-place.

The first stage of spending the donated money was to erect scaffolding so that the building could be made safe around the shell holes. Over the weeks he had been in the village, Bart had watched the erection of the scaffolding but had seen precious little work carried out there, and he'd thought the benefactors had only a damn small return to show for their bucks. The body hung from the scaffolding.

He was a doctor who was familiar with the south-west of England, the Torbay district of the county of Devon, the town of Torquay. Where he came from could be summoned by cream teas, rolling fields grazed by cattle, families holidaying on beaches, retirement homes for men and women in their twilight years… The body of a lynch victim was suspended from the rusted scaffolding poles. The vomit rose in his throat. He understood, knew how far he had fallen.

The legs no longer kicked, but the rope between the poles and the neck twisted in the light wind and the heavy rain; the body spiralled rhythmically. The rain was dragged off the windscreen by the wipers. Bart had a clear view of the victim and of the mob below.

He could not have said whether the knife cuts that loosed the dripping blood had been inflicted before the victim was hanged, or while he was hanging but still alive, or after life had been jerked away. The rain fell hard on the body and the man's T-shirt was soaked against his chest and his back, and the flow of water made the blood run easily. In the dulled light, he saw the brightness of knives and a butcher's cleaver raised above the heads of the chanting crowd. Bart had been driving into the square, had seen the milling mob, had braked. Only when he had stopped had he seen the object of the crowd's fury – the body below the rope and the drip of the blood.