Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

‘Is she hurt?’

Haquim snapped, ‘Of course she is hurt.’

‘Has she had treatment?’

‘Mr Peake, twenty of our men are dead, but twice that number are wounded and cannot walk as she can. There are many people from the village who are hurt – and there are their dead. She is the inspiration. Can she go to the front of the queue and demand, because of her importance, that her wound is treated? If she had not risen when she was hit the attack would have failed. If the men do not believe she can go forward, the advance is finished. She cannot show weakness. It is the price she must pay.’

Gus climbed down the ladder from the roof, went out through the command-post door and past the body of the officer. He walked briskly around the queue of peshmerga and villagers, some standing, some sitting and others just lying in the mud, silent or crying in their pain. He headed away from the grave-pit, and away from the last bodies. Her voice behind him was faint. He squatted down in the dirt, his back to the village, and stared out through the wire at the slope of the hills, and the mountain crests.

From behind him, Omar asked, ‘Do you think, Mr Gus, he is there, searching for you?’ *** The brigadier asked him where he was going. Major Aziz shrugged, pointed vaguely to the hills beyond the flame. Because he had been sent from Baghdad on the orders of the Estikhabarat, he did not have to explain himself. He walked out of the bunker; it perplexed him that reinforcements had not yet been sent, that the great lines of tanks and personnel carriers still rested in idle lines. It irritated him more that he could not recall where, or when, he had met the brigadier, but his mind was too clogged with details of his task for him to pursue it.

Behind him, in his bare quarters, on the floor underneath the smiling photograph of his President, he left the polished box and the folded rug on which the dog had slept. On the neatly made bed he had laid out all the spare clothes that had filled his backpack when he had flown north, and the pouch with his razor and toothpaste. On the chest beside the bed was the leather frame that held the pictures of his wife and his sons. He put his wedding ring and the birthday ring beside the frame.

He walked to the jeep and the driver started the engine. Aziz sat beside him, the Dragunov across his legs and the dog beside his feet. In the backpack, stripped down to necessities, were spare ammunition, his telescope, a half-loaf of bread, a quarter-kilo of cheese, his half-filled water bottle, dried biscuits for the dog, what he called the Dennison suit, maps and a folder of aerial photographs. He ruffled the fur at the dog’s collar, saw the pleasure on its face and felt the beat of its cropped tail against his boots.

The jeep drove away from Kirkuk, and passed through the brigade formation at the crossroads for Sulaymaniyah and Baghdad, climbing towards the town of Tarjil. It was as if he were coming home.

‘You know what? It’s my last bloody war zone – thank God.’

Dean thought it was the fourth time that night Mike had made that promise, Gretchen reckoned it was at least the fifth. A week of evenings together in the ground-floor bar of the Hotel Malkoc, and the story that had brought them to Diyarbakir was still beyond reach. The whisper was that the spring thaw would provide an opportunity for Saddam Hussein to advance again into northern Iraq. But they were in Turkey, and the border was closed.

‘Only war zone I’ve found is the goddam bathroom. “As dusk fell tonight, a vista of carnage and destruction was witnessed by your correspondent. Under a flickering light I surveyed, quote, scenes reminiscent of the worst horrors of the French revolution, end quote, in which no prisoners had been taken. After a good stamping session, I counted the corpses on my bathroom floor of forty-three cockroaches, their lives taken in the prime

…” ’ Dean was a roving reporter for a Baltimore paper and had covered every substantial conflagration in the region over the last seventeen years.

‘That’s bollocks.’ Mike was slumped in a rattan chair, swatting at flies and passably drunk. His Turkish cameraman was in the old city hunting women. Mike was a veteran reporter for the BBC, and was in the fast decline towards retirement.

‘You got a better war zone?’ Dean grinned.

‘Did you get on air tonight, Mike?’ Gretchen was conciliatory. She was forty, going on fifty, and worked for the Der Spiegel group out of Frankfurt. She was neither a threat nor an attraction to them. At the start of every assignment that brought them together she told them how she missed home and the company of her friend, Anneliese. She dressed like them: chukka boots, trousers with too many zip pockets, open-necked shirts showing their chests, safari tops with loops for pens.

‘No. I am not on the air tonight. I might get a showing on breakfast tomorrow, but I’m not holding my breath. What about you, Dean?’

‘Thank you for your kind consideration. I was dropped – “pressure of space”.

Gretchen, how’d they take your feature?’

‘Took it, probably already used it – to clean the lavatory. I am “on hold pending a peg”.’

Mike and his cameraman had tried to film the Turkish army in the streets of Diyarbakir, and been swamped by plain-clothes security men. Dean had filed on the scandal of the decay of the city’s medieval mosques. Gretchen had written six thousand words on child labour in the clothing sweat factories. They had all tried to justify their existence as they waited for the permission that didn’t come to cross the border that remained resolutely closed. Northern Iraq was near and unreachable.

‘If I was to use the word “introverted”, and then the word “self-obsessed”, who would I be talking about?’ Mike finished his drink and slapped the glass down on the table for the waiter’s attention.

‘You would, of course, be talking about our esteemed editors.’

‘It’s my last war zone.’

‘Fifth time.’

‘Wrong, sixth, easy.’

‘Last war zone – fuck you two – if I ever get to it, if – because my loved and admired editor is short on interest.’

‘Seem to have heard that record played somewhere before. “Sorry, Dean, but it’s the stock-market that’s playing big right now.”’

Mike banged his glass down again, louder, harder. ‘“Sorry, mate, but we really need something that’ll hook the viewer, like a celebrity visit – that’s if you’re unable to give us combat footage. Has to be an angle, Mike.” Problem is, I shot my mouth off, told them the tanks were going to roll… and I haven’t heard that Julia Roberts is arriving with an orang-utan, or Goldie Hawn up an elephant.’

‘You guys are joking.’

‘Or, Gretchen, we would cry,’ Dean said.

She persisted. ‘It is serious. Nobody cares back home. The editors tell it as it is. We believe that people at home are interested, and troubled, by the world outside their front door. We are old-fashioned, we are not “new”. When I go home, my neighbours are polite and ask where I have been. I tell them I have travelled to Somalia or Iran or Sudan, where people are suffering, and they are embarrassed…’

‘There is no technology to titillate, no smart-bomb videos, no cyber war. That’s why interest is spread thin. Doesn’t faze me – my last time, thank God…’

‘And on he goes.’

‘Fuck you both. Then I’m off to grow roses and sail a boat – and I will be, I promise faithfully, an anecdote-free zone. Not that anybody would listen.’

‘I don’t understand why people don’t care. In affluent societies, with safe lives, there is a duty of caring.’

Mike thought she was always saddest when she was earnest. ‘Forget it, Gretchen. Just enjoy the beer, the expenses, and the dazzling brilliance of the company around you.’