Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

Dean said, ‘We’re all in the same shit, but attacking it separately. I don’t usually share.’

Mike was twisting and semaphoring to the waiter. ‘When it’s sharing your money you’ve stitched-up pockets.’

‘No way I’d share if I had a half-chance of screwing you deadbeats. I’m sharing because I can’t, as you can’t, get across that border.’ His voice had dropped, more from habit than the proximity of the Turkish plain-clothes police at a nearby table with their glasses of orange juice. ‘I was talking to one of the Turk lorry drivers who goes across, runs food loads for the UN. I offered him five hundred bucks to take me with him.’

‘You tricky bastard.’

‘You’d have left us here?’

‘Damned right I would. Didn’t do me any good. You know what he said, big bastard with no teeth? He asked me how I knew he wouldn’t drop me off on a God-awful lonely road where an Iraqi agent could take good care of me and give me a lift all the way to Baghdad. He said he’d get ten thousand dollars as bounty for an American illegal – be the same for a Britisher. Sorry, it’d be less for a German lady. Kind of nixed the negotiation.’

‘Is this story going anywhere? If it isn’t I’m off to force our bloody order down little Peach-bottom’s throat.’

‘He said there was a rumour of fighting down south on the ceasefire line.’

‘There’s always that rumour.’ Gretchen scratched at her armpit.

‘This afternoon he said a Kurdish army was being led south by a woman.’

Mike laughed loud. ‘Are you winding me up?’

‘A young woman, good-looking, with tits and an ass.’

‘Jesus, I wish I believed you.’

‘Why not a woman?’ Gretchen scowled. ‘Why should a woman not lead an army?

Why cannot men be led by a woman?’

Mike said solemnly, ‘Because it’s Kurdistan, lovely lady, because this is the Stone Age. Because women are in the home to cook, clean and open their legs on a Saturday night. I’d lead the bulletin, might even get a special out of it.’

Gretchen laughed. ‘I’d get the cover and ten pages inside.’

Dean stood. ‘After a lifetime of alcohol abuse, Mike, you are a total fucking failure at ordering drinks. You want something in this life, you have to do it yourself.’

‘Hey, it’s just a wet dream, because the border’s closed. What a way to go out from the last war zone. So, no Pulitzers for you.’ Mike caught the American’s arm and mimicked his accent. ‘“As dusk fell tonight over a vista of carnage and destruction, your correspondent stood beside the newest general to confront the awesome power of Saddam Hussein. She is a woman of soft beauty, who said her hero was the Duke of Wellington

…”’

‘Wrong… Schwartzkopf – no question.’

‘I’d love to think it’s true – two brandies, one straight Scotch, doubles. Go on, hurry up, you try and get some action here. A woman, leading an army, now that would be some story…’

In the quiet of the night, she came to the place by the wire where Gus sat.

‘The best tale in Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard’s book is about the cat. There was a German trench that was thought to be disused, but this lieutenant from the Royal Warwickshire Regiment – with his telescope – saw the cat sunning itself.’

‘He’s asleep, Gus.’ There was the tinkle of her quiet laughter. ‘I think the cat will have to keep until tomorrow.’

He had known the boy was asleep. He was telling the story for himself, for comfort.

She sat close to him. He put his arm lightly around her shoulder and remembered how he had felt when the boy had told him she was down.

‘Without your grandfather, his friendship for my grandfather, I would be a peasant.’

‘Has your wound been treated?’

‘Without his books I would not be able to read. I would be in a village with children, animals, a small field and a man – and I would have nothing.’

‘Stop talking for a moment and answer me. Has anyone looked at your wound?’

The night was around them, and the quiet. The scant moon’s light shimmered on the wire of the fence in front of them. Gus held her shoulder loosely, as if she were a sister or a loved cousin. At home he had neither. He smelt the stale sweat of her body and the dankness of her clothes. No radios played behind them, and he heard no voices. Gus thought the village was stilled by mourning and exhaustion.

‘I know from the books, Gus, of the workings of the engine of a Hastings aircraft of Transport Command and the armaments carried by a Vampire jet bomber. I do not think that many peasant women have such knowledge. I know the history of the Peninsula war, and the campaign of the British in North Africa. I know of the lives of Montgomery and Haig, Kitchener and Wellington, and why William won at Hastings, Henry at Agincourt.

I read the books well that your grandfather gave to my grandfather. How could I be a peasant?’

‘If you’re wounded, it must be looked at and treated.’

‘How could I work in the fields, clean children, cook, watch goats and sheep, when I have read the many books given to Hoyshar? I think it was destiny, Gus.’

‘It has to be looked at.’

‘I felt the weakness when I fell. It was God’s mercy that very few of the men saw I was hit. If they know I am hurt, believe I cannot go forward, they will be gone by the morning. It would be the end of the destiny. Do you not understand, Gus? I cannot go for treatment where the wound is seen.’

He asked quietly, a murmur in her ear, ‘Will you allow me to look at the wound?’

‘But you would not tell? You must not…’

There had been a fierceness in her voice when she had spoken of destiny. When she spoke of the wound there was, Gus recognized it, a timid slightness about her. The wound made her young, frightened. He understood. Destiny would carry forward the cold, hard, cruel men of the peshmerga – the pain of the wound and her fear would cause them to go.

If she could not go forward then he, himself, would turn. He would go back to his grandfather, back to Meg, back to Stickledown Range, back to the offices of Davies and Sons; he sensed the burden she carried.

Gus said, ‘I’m sorry, I know very little about medical treatment. I’ll do what I can.’

‘But you won’t tell?’

‘I promise.’

He slipped his arm from her shoulder and walked across the dead, darkened ground between the wire and the homes of concrete blocks. He stumbled against the carcass of a dead sheep, sloshed in the mud of a sewer, moved past the low houses where muted lights burned. He went into the command post, where Haquim was crouched over the captured maps. He told Haquim what he wanted, and saw anguish crease the face of the fighter, ageing him.

Haquim stood awkwardly, as if the pain had settled again on his old wound, and was gone. If her injury was serious, if she was living on borrowed time, it was all finished.

Gus sat amongst the dark debris of the command post. All finished, for nothing… The minutes slipped by. He would return home and the one thing in his life that had seemed to him to be important would have been dogged by failure. He would carry that failure to his grave. Haquim returned.

Gus carried the saucepan of boiled water, the sealed field dressing, the small wad of cotton wool, the narrow roll of bandage gauze and the torch out into the night.

He set down the torch, knelt beside her, and did what no man had done. His fingers trembled as he reached under her tunic, unbuttoned the waist of her trousers and drew down the zip. She was looking into his face and he saw trust there. He put his arm around her waist, lifted her to drag down her trousers and felt the spasm of pain grip her. He saw the clean skin of her thigh, the caked blood and the livid colour of the bruising. He tore off small pieces of cotton wool, dipped them in the water and began to separate the blood from the bruising.