Gerald Seymour: Holding the Zero

There were no hand-woven tapestries on the walls, nor any photographs, but on the wall in front of him, hanging from a hook where it was at an easy height to be snatched down, was an assault rifle with a magazine fitted.

Behind him, against the door, the men watched in silence and waited for the women’s work to be done.

Gnarled fingers with broken nails and dirt-grimed wrinkles fought with needles to gather in pieces of the garment. It had once been a suit of overalls that a mechanic would have worn; it was drab olive green. Two women were busy sewing the heavy canvas strip that had been cut from an old tarpaulin to the front. Another pulled for possession of the knees and elbows, to sew smaller canvas squares onto them. Another stitched a veil of soft, sand-coloured netting to the front of the hood, which had already been fastened to the collar. Three more women clawed at the back, shoulders, body, legs and arms, wherever he pointed, and sewed to them short-looped straps of hessian fabric. The garment was wrenched from hand to hand, over the smouldering fire of wet wood, past and around the hurricane oil lamp. Each time a strap was in place and the cotton snapped, the eyes would look to him and he would point again to a place where the surface was not broken, the hessian strap would be torn for the necessary length and the needles would dive and flash in the light. They talked softly among themselves. It was a language of which he knew nothing, but when they caught his glance the older women cackled, gaptoothed, in amusement, and the younger ones, who were little more than girls, dropped their heads and giggled.

The fire gave little heat, only smoke; the lamp gave a small light and many shadows.

The smoke was in his eyes, watering them, and the smell of the oil from the lamp was in his nose and his mouth.

The shape of the overalls was changing. The clear lines of the body, arms and legs were gradually distorted by the mess of hessian straps; the sharpness of the outline was broken in a hundred places. The needles darted, disappeared, then rose again. Each time the garment was pulled by a new hand the smoke billowed under it and fanned into their faces and his. It was good work, and he could not have accomplished it himself. When they were finished he thanked them. There was laughter all around the room as he stood and held the garment against his body.

A man stepped forward and tugged at his arm, as if to tell him that his time had run out.

Gus untied the laces of the old hiking-boots he had brought with him, then kicked them off. He pulled on the loose overalls over his denims, shirt and sweater. He wriggled and shook into the garment, pulled up the zip from crotch to throat. A woman broke the circle around the fire, went to the mattress bed, took a small broken shard of mirror from a plastic bag of her treasures, and handed it to him. He stood to his full height, his head close to the plastic-sheeted ceiling, and the smoke curled around him. He looked into the mirror to study the front, then held it out to the side at arm’s length and tilted his head so that he could see part of his own back. He pulled up the cowled hood and dropped the veil over his face. There was more laughter.

He told them that, in his own country, this was called a ‘gillie’ suit, and he said it was the best he had ever seen and that, pray his God and theirs, he would be invisible to the enemy of them all – and they seemed not to understand a word he said. And he thanked them. With his hands and his eyes, he thanked them, and there was a murmur of appreciation. The oldest woman pushed herself up arthritically from her place by the fire and touched his arm, a gentle, sweeping brush as if now he was understood.

After he had laced his boots, the oldest woman took the mirror from him and held it where he could best look into it. He lifted the veil then bent to take the small tubes of camouflage cream from his rucksack. He smeared lines of ochre, black and green on to his hands and throat, his nose, cheeks and chin.

The door opened behind him. The wind howled into the room, guttered the fire, spread the smoke and flickered the lamp. The children cowered under their tent of sacks and blankets.

‘It is time, Mr Peake? You are ready?’

‘Yes, Haquim, I am ready.’

Kneeling beside the rucksack, he put the tubes of cream back into a side pouch and gazed down at the rifle around which the hessian bandage was already wound. The lens of the telescopic sight flickered in the lamplight. Abruptly, he zipped shut the camouflaged, padded carrying case that held the rifle. He turned for the door.

They would be finished now. The night would have fallen heavy on Stickledown Range, his colleagues of the Historic Breech-loading and Small-arms Association would be gone. They would have had their last beer, worried over their scoring charts, packed their cars, locked up their caravans, and would be on the crowded roads going their separate ways to their homes. He doubted that they would have missed him… The owls would be out now over the quietness of the range, hunting for the rabbits that would have emerged once the boom of the old rifles was silenced. He breathed hard then rocked slowly on his feet before slipping the strap of the carrying case over one shoulder and the loop of the rucksack over the other. His shadow leaped from the assault rifle on the wall towards the children shivering on their bed. He wondered if any of those in their cars at the end of their day’s target shooting knew the true force of fear. But it had been his choice to come, his decision… Without a backward glance he went out through the door.

The men were around him. The wind gripped at the hessian straps and caught the billows of his gillie suit. He thought of the Lee Enfield No. 4 Mark 1 (T) in its secure cabinet at home, and the collection of silver teaspoons, awarded for competition marksmanship, in the sideboard drawer. He walked towards the lights of the vehicles.

Close about him was the darkness, the smell of fighting men and the scent of struggle

… It had been his own decision, his own choice.

It is a place that is an afterthought of history.

The Tarus and Zagros mountains are the kernel of this region and its people. The natural limits, recognized only by the inhabitants of a harsh, wind-stripped land, are the plains below the mountains to the south and east, the upwaters of the great Tigris river to the west, and the Black Sea shores to the north. The modern frontiers, created artificially by long-dead diplomats in faraway chancelleries, have divided up the territory with a confluence of boundaries scarring that kernel. The present-day nation states of Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq now have uncertain stewardship of the towering mountains, the razor-edged ridges running between them and the cliff-faced valleys below, and jealously guard their sovereign rights with aircraft, artillery pieces, armoured vehicles, infantrymen and the shadowy agents of the secret police.

The people of this arbitrarily carved land are the Kurds. They have an old history, a culture unique to themselves, a language that is their own, and no country. Only when they are useful in gaining greater political advantage to outsiders is their dream of nationhood supported, or when their pathetic lot in defeat pricks foreigners’ consciences.

Most days of the week, most weeks of the year, most years of a decade, most decades of a century, their dream and their struggle are ignored by blind eyes and deaf ears. They are not Arabs, not Persians, not Turks; they do not fit conveniently.

A war progresses fitfully in that part of the Kurdish heartland that is nominally within the territorial boundaries of the Republic of Iraq. It is like a restless man’s sleep, sometimes aroused and flailing intensely, sometimes dormant. The enemy of today, as he has been for twenty years, is the President in his palace in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein.