Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

The streets on either side of the police station were filled with scrambling civilians in desperate flight, carrying bundles or sacks or bags, and some dragging children behind them.

He looped his backpack over his shoulders and crawled away towards the far side of the roof where the iron ladder led down to the vehicle yard.

He saw the commanding officer of the regiment charged with the defence of the town.

The yard was thick with the choking smoke of fumes from two personnel carriers and five jeeps. The officer was running heavily towards the forward jeep, which faced the opened gates of the yard, burdened by his packed bags, a rolled carpet flopping under his arm.

Already in the jeeps were the second-in-command, the operations officer, the intelligence officer, the political officer, more bags, more carpets and pictures.

He raised his rifle, as the line spurted forward, and aimed at the coarse clipped hairs on the back of the commanding officer’s neck, the sweaty stain between the shoulders, and fired.

The man slumped onto the bags and the rolled carpet, and the jeep was gone through the back gate of the yard. He ejected the used cartridge case, picked up the dog and climbed quickly down the ladder into the deserted yard.

The firing had died.

Gus eased himself up from his prone position and started to massage the stiffness from his legs.

Meda was on top of the barricade, balancing her weight on the door of the central car, and again, as she had before, she punched the air. He wondered how many times she had been seen over the open sights of the soldiers’ weapons, how many times they had fired at her and, somehow charmed, she had escaped. She was the symbol, she was the witch.

The men swarmed past her and fanned out into the streets on either side of the police station. Gus lingered at the firing position and watched as Haquim reached up and urged her down.

As he lingered, he hated himself. He waited, ready to shoot, because the sniper on the rooftops or in an upper window might still fire on her and give away his position. But she was down, safe and protected by the barricade.

He started to pack away his equipment, and the telescope the boy had left behind.

He had seen her.

He could have stood on a doorstep, snatched at a packing case from a shop, shot over the heads of the fleeing townspeople, over the emptiness of the street behind them, and over the peshmerga beyond the emptiness. He could have hit her as she stood on the barricade of cars.

He could have killed the witch.

And yet he had not considered it. He had known that, if he had fired, every weapon in the hands of the peshmerga would have been turned on him and on the flight of the defenceless in reprisal. He had joined the jostling panic of the escape.

He was engulfed in the tide, was swept forward. He held the dog close to his chest. He had been in a desperate flight before, and he disliked the disorder. In the Mutla Pass out of Kuwait City and at the bridge over the Tigris river, with the American tanks behind them and the planes wheeling above them, he had run for his life. The firing of the one shot, his contribution to the battle, did not cause him to feel guilt. The hurt, deep and personal, was that his waiting had not been rewarded… He was out of the town and among the column of civilians. He put the dog down so that it could run beside him.

He saw the disappointment and anger on the faces of those around him and could not tell them why he lived, why they should not have believed in him, or where he had been with his rifle.

The triumph glowed in her. ‘We didn’t see you, didn’t hear you.’

He said dully, ‘I was looking for their sniper…’

‘What? Is that a joke?’

‘If I had fired, after the shot against the dish, I’d have given my position to their sniper.

I waited for him to make the mistake and -’

‘Whatever you say, but make sure you clean it, Gus. There will be a jam because it was not cleaned. We needed you, so clean it.’

He walked away from Meda and rounded the barricade of cars. The bodies were against each other, the soldiers’ and the peshmerga ’s, locked against each other as if the final struggle for the barricade had been hand to hand. The stink was of opened bowels, spilled fuel and discarded cartridges. Haquim was folding away the box, Josephus, that had blocked the radio after the communications dish had been shot out.

‘Why did you not shoot? Was there a malfunction? We have at least a hundred casualties. I waited for you to shoot – you could have saved so many of our casualties.

You should not blame yourself. Anyone can suffer a malfunction.’

He strode on from Haquim, cursing his low expectations. He went towards the sagging gates at the front of the police station. There was an entry to the left, half blocked by a cart with a dead donkey still in its shafts, and saw the heap of uniformed bodies behind the cart, then the sudden movement as if a rat disturbed rubbish bags. It was Omar. Gus watched as the boy scurried over the bodies and methodically pilfered from them. First a gold chain ripped from a throat, then a ring wrenched from a finger, then a wallet snatched from an inner pocket, the blood wiped off it and the notes taken, a bracelet prised from a wrist.

Gus strode forward.

He stepped over the dead donkey and insinuated himself between the cart and the wall, and he kicked as hard as he could. He felt the shock wave ripple up from his boot to his hip. He kicked Omar off the bodies, and the boy cringed. He struck him with the butt of his rifle. The boy cowered against the wall and the brightness of the loot was in his hands, which were clasped across his face. Again and again, brutally, Gus battered the boy with his rifle butt. He brought blood to the boy’s face, from his forehead and eyes.

Blood was in the boy’s nose, dammed in the wisps of his moustache.

Omar shouted through his hands, ‘At last you have found, Mr Gus, a job for your rifle.

Now you are brave with your rifle.’

He left the boy against the wall and walked on into the town.

Aziz looked back.

Behind him was the great straggling column of the survivors, men, women and children, civilians and soldiers, and further behind were the bags, sacks and bundles discarded under the bright heat of the afternoon’s sun.

He remembered the first time he had gone to war, nineteen years old. His division of mechanized infantry, in support of two armoured divisions, had surged out of Jordan and over the frontier to support the battered Syrian tanks in their fight for survival against the Zionists. They had gone with high hopes, brimming confidence, and the Zionists had hit them at the village of Kfar Shams. Crouched behind the thin walls of his personnel carrier, he had witnessed the carnage of defeat in combat. They had limped home to Baghdad. His father had met him at the barracks. The nineteen-year-old had nursed the stench of defeat, but his father had declaimed that they were national heroes who had saved the flank of the Syrian army and protected Damascus from capture. It was what the radio had told the people but he had known the reality of the catastrophe. Then, the teenage Karim Aziz had carried no responsibility.

He walked on towards the brigade at the crossroads. *** They were a force of liberation, but no crowds cheered them from the pavements.

The peshmerga, in gangs, kicked down the doors of homes, dragged up the shutters from shop windows, took what they could carry, and smashed what they had to leave behind.

No flowers were thrown down at them from upper windows.

He did not see Meda or Haquim. He thought that they would be far back at the barricades, where they would see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing of how the wave of freedom crashed over the town of Tarjil.