Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

‘If you reach Kirkuk…’

‘ When – and you will be with me.’

‘When you reach Kirkuk what will you do then?’

‘Return to my village. Tell my grandfather what I have done. And I will be a farmer.

We have goats there, and a pig. Kurdistan will be free, my work will be done, and I will collect the fruit from the mulberry bushes and the pomegranate trees. I will be a farmer.

May I tell you something?’

‘Of course.’

The boy came with a plastic bowl of food for her, but she waved him away. Her hand rested on Gus’s shoulder, the gesture of an older man to an inexperienced youth. ‘If you had not fired the first shot and killed the officer, if you had not come, we would still have taken their bunkers. A few of the men behind me would have been killed, and some would have been wounded, but we would still have taken the bunkers – and whether you are with us or not, we will march to Kirkuk where the flame burns over the oilfield. Can we forget about your anger now?’

‘Yes.’ Every criticism he had made had been ignored.

‘And will you follow me to Kirkuk?’

‘Yes.’ Gus laughed and saw her eyes flash.

‘Do not be so solemn. How is your grandfather’s health?’

‘I suppose I’d better start at the beginning. That would be the orderly way to do it.’

‘Yes, start at the beginning,’ Ms Carol Manning said.

Ken Willet sat at a table behind her. Among the plates, the empty glass and the cup with dregs of coffee in it, he opened a foolscap notebook. At the top of the page he wrote,

‘WING CO BASIL PEAKE’. Immediately underneath the page heading he scrawled ‘LETTER’, and half-way down the page ‘MOTIVATION’. Ms Manning’s temper had sounded grim at midnight when she’d rung to tell him that her lieu day was postponed; there was no improvement now.

‘It all began at Habbaniyah – I don’t suppose, my dear, you’ve ever heard that name.’

‘I haven’t, but I’d be grateful if you’d get on with it.’

Willet thought the old man’s eyes glittered in covert amusement.

They’d come up the drive to the vicarage, found it locked, shuttered, and a solitary cat had run from their approach. After circling the darkened building, late Georgian or early Victorian, they’d seen the modern bungalow – where a dull light burned – set back amongst trees beyond lawns covered with the winter’s leaves. But the daffodils were up, and made a show with beds of crocuses. It was five to eight when she pressed the bell button.

‘Habbaniyah is just north of the Euphrates, about forty-five miles west of Baghdad. Of course, there’s a vegetation belt alongside the river, but where we were was surrounded by desert dunes, flat, horrible, lifeless. It’s 1953, before you were born, my dear, I think.

There was an RAF base there. It was ghastly. There was a single runway of rolled dirt reinforced with perforated metal plate. There were only three permanent buildings: administration, sick quarters and a damn great control tower. Everyone, men and officers, right up to the CO, lived in tents. We were “in the blue” – that’s colloquial, my dear, in the forces for being posted out to the back end of nowhere. I was one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine penguins – you know what they call the RAF? The penguins, only one in a thousand flies… Sorry, just joking…’

‘Best you stick to the point,’ she said.

‘As you wish. I was a wing commander, in charge of movements. The control tower was mine. We were a little island in hostile territory. The King and his government in Baghdad were marionettes for our ambassador to play with, but increasingly there was resentment from the civilian population and the younger army officers about our presence

– so we lived on camp. All the food was flown in. We had a swimming-pool of sorts, a marquee dropped down into a sand scrape, and we had sports pitches – we didn’t play the locals, we’d go as far as Nairobi, Aden or Karachi for cricket, hockey and soccer. To get out, if we had a few days’ leave, we hitched rides to Cyprus or Beirut – few of the officers and none of the men were permitted to travel inside Iraq.’

He was eighty-four years old, widowed for the last six. Willet thought the straightness of his back remarkable. Wearing worn carpet slippers, flannel pyjamas and a heavy dressing gown, he’d let them in, sat them down, then excused himself with old-world politeness. He’d come back still dressed in the slippers, pyjamas and dressing gown, but shaven and with his fine silver hair carefully combed. He’d checked their identity cards, then eased into a high wing-backed chair. He hadn’t challenged them, had seemed in fact to have expected them.

‘You passed on a letter to your grandson, Augustus Peake.’

‘Patience, my dear, always a virtue… We had two squadrons of Vampire fighter-bombers there. It was a troubled little corner of the world, the Soviet border was less than an hour’s flying away, and we had the transports coming through. They used to put down on Malta, then reach us, then go on to East Africa or the Red Sea, or keep going east to Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea. Most of the transports were Hastings, 53 Squadron.

They came in and went out in the early morning; that’s when everyone did their day’s work. After that, in the heat – mad dogs and Englishmen stuff – we played sport. In the evening, officers anyway, we dressed for dinner, drank, ate, drank, played cards or took in a film in the open-air cinema, drank, and went to bed. We had to wear our issue greatcoats over our pyjamas, it was so damned cold. An evening a week, I was out on guard duty in support of the RAF regiment, shooting at shadows out of our trenches – the Arabs would steal anything they could creep in and get their hands on. It was damned dull. That wasn’t good enough for me. All I saw of the local culture was the traders at the main gate, nomads crossing the desert, and the thieves looking for a gap in our defences at night. What a waste… Barbara – that’s my wife – wrote to me from the married quarters in Lyneham and pointed out what was just over the horizon. Well, not exactly -about two hundred miles, actually. Antiquities. Do you know anything about antiquities, my dear?’

‘No, I don’t, but I expect you’re going to tell me.’

A myth, handed from grandfather to child, says that the Ark of Noah grounded as the floods fell back on the summit of Mount Cudi in present-day Iraq, 4,490 years before the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. The survivors were the first Kurds.

They were, through history, a warrior people.

Another myth, from ancient Jewish lore, tells that four hundred virgins were taken out of Europe by devil spirits who had been exiled from the court of Solomon, the djinn, to the Zagros mountains and their bastard children became the unique and isolated Kurds.

Xenophon wrote of the retreat of 10,000 Greek soldiers towards their homeland after defeat by Cyrus of Persia, and a week-long epic battle through the mountain passes, harried by the ferocious Carduchi tribesmen. The victor over the Crusader king, Richard the Lionheart of England, at Hittin by the Sea of Galilee was Salah al-Din Yusuf, the Kurd known in medieval Europe as Saladin. Kurds fought on both sides in the war of total barbarity, four hundred years ago, between Beg Ustajlu and Selim the Cruel. As irregular soldiers, toughened by the physical hardship of life in the mountains, they were employed occasionally by the governments of Britain, France and Russia. But the reward never came… their own country was never given to them. When their usefulness was past they were as bones thrown from the table.

They were an image of the fallen stones from temples and palaces, scattered, antiquities.