Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

‘The tanks came, you were wrong.’

‘But you, the hero, stopped them,’ she taunted.

‘I did what I could.’

‘If I don’t apologize, if my judgement was wrong, why do you stay?’

‘I don’t think I could explain.’

He had not moved all day. He had allowed the tiredness to seep from his body into the ground. He could not see her face, but the strut of her body was in bold outline above him and the bulk of her seemed greater because her hands were set on her hips. It was Gus’s own small piece of defiance that he had sat all through the day and into the evening darkness against the jeep’s wheel. If she wanted to come to him she could; if she did not, he would not go in search of her. Small fires were burning and around them were little clusters of men, some in earshot and some beyond. In the middle of the night he would move. Haquim had talked of helicopters… Omar had left him, and sometimes he saw his slight silhouette drift close to the fires then disappear. He thought the boy craved the company of adult fighters, as if that took away his youth. He was sorry that the boy had stayed.

The anger rippled in her. ‘I did everything for them, and they gave me trifles. At the moment I needed them, the swine – Bekir and Ibrahim – turned away from me because the final victory has to be earned and is not set in stone. When I am in Kirkuk…’

‘What will they do when you are in Kirkuk?’

She snorted. ‘Come, of course, what else? Come to take the rewards for what I have done for them.’

‘Yes.’

Gus jacked himself up. He used the butt of his rifle to push himself off the ground, and he hitched his rucksack onto his shoulder. He took her hand. He wondered if she would fight him. He took it loosely, then tightened his grip to jolt her forward. She dug in her heels, but his grip was the same as when he held the rifle ready to shoot, firm and strong.

As Gus took the first strides she held back but with each step he jerked harder, and after the first strides she accepted and walked beside him. They went past the sentries, sitting and smoking cigarettes, out into the black darkness beyond the perimeter of the crossroads camp.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Towards Nineveh,’ Gus said.

‘That is more than a hundred kilometres, and backwards.’

He said patiently, ‘We are going where we can imagine we are at Nineveh.’

‘If we could reach it, and we cannot, all we would find are old rocks and old stones.’

‘It’s where it began – it’s why I am here. It started at Nineveh.’

‘That is rubbish.’

‘We are going towards Nineveh.’

He led and she no longer fought him. They walked away from the wire and left the flickering fires behind them. They were under stars and a thin moon’s crescent. From the time he could sit on his grandfather’s knee and smell the stale whiff of tobacco on his breath, he had known of the palace, and the friendship made there. Deep in the memory of childhood was the story of King Sennacherib who had died 2,680 years ago, when the same stars and the same thin moon made a pallid dullness of the ground, and the same stars and moon had watched over the friendship of men now aged. Grafted in his mind, from the days when he could first read, were the pictures in the books of the throne room in the palace and the bas-reliefs and the shallow outline of the excavated city gates. There was a figure in relief that he remembered above all, a crouching archer. In an album of faded photographs, two men stood outside a tent, posed beside a car, larked in the ruins, knelt and helped the archaeologists: one was tall and wore an open shirt, and a wide-brimmed hat, ludicrous baggy shorts and battered sandals; the other was shorter and seemed heavier in the folds of the long-tailed tribal shirt and the shapeless trousers, with curled unruly hair under a cloth wound as a turban. And the same quiet, the same stars and moon had blessed that friendship, at Nineveh.

‘There were stories and books and pictures, but it was too far away to be real. There were letters sent to my grandfather, by your grandfather, but they had no value, no context in anything I knew. Then I came with him to the border. We found his friend, and we found you. You never cried. All around you was screaming and weeping, despair.

You had just buried your brothers. You hung back, somehow apart from the misery around you. I had never seen before, have never seen again, a young face of such determination. You were not more than a child, you never spoke, but I saw your face.

Whatever else in my life goes on past me, that face is always with me… I may not be good with words, but I am blessed for having known you, given me from old men’s friendship. Do you think we are close now to the old men, near to Nineveh?’

‘I think we are.’

‘I came because that face, without tears, enabled me to dream and to dare.’

He sat on the ground. He pulled her down beside him. A shell whined high over them and exploded in the distance on the road. He felt the light wind, medium strength but coming on to fresh, on his face, and she shuddered. He hesitated, then slipped his arm over her shoulder. Gus knew it was not the cold that made the shudder in her body.

Together, his arm around her shoulder, they could dream, dare. He pulled her harder against him, her shoulder under his, her hair against his cheek, her hips against his, her thigh… She cried out in pain. She was so strong, so proud, so bloody obstinate, and he had forgotten. He took the torch from his pocket. He did not speak. He pushed her back onto the dirt, and his hand went to her belt. He unfastened it and dragged down her trouser zip. He heaved the trousers down and shone the torch onto her thigh. The dressing was gone, and the edge of the wound was reddened and angry. Maggots moved in the centre of it, between the weals that marked its limits. He saw the wriggling life of the maggots. He crouched over her thigh, smelt the dankness of her, and very carefully began to pick each of the maggots from the wound. She did not cry out again. He poured water from his bottle over the wound and washed away the newest of the flies’ eggs. He did not criticize her for not having had the wound dressed, for not having stolen the time of the aid-worker at Tarjil while she’d worked to save the worst of the casualties. He loved her because, under the bombast of her conceit, she would never put herself first, and never complain for fear that her strength was diminished. He made the wound clean. He switched off the torch, lifted her buttocks, drew up her trousers and zipped them, then fastened her belt.

He did not think it was necessary to fumble for words to explain why he had stayed.

He saw the great flame burning and beyond it were the roofs, minarets and the high buildings of Kirkuk. He could dream and he could dare, because of her. He kissed her. It was a slow, awkward kiss, lip to lip, mouth to mouth, the kiss of teenage children in wonderment.

They walked back into the camp, away from Nineveh.

She called briskly for a briefing meeting in fifteen minutes, and the shyness was gone from her.

There was a jeep parked near to one of the fires and Gus saw Haquim beside it.

Haquim said, ‘As you could not leave her, neither could I, though it was the act of a fool to come back.’

‘Why?’

‘To be with her, and to tell you about helicopters…’

‘You didn’t have to come back – I know about helicopters.’

‘And to shield her, to keep her safe from herself.’

Gus settled comfortably against the jeep’s wheel. The boy brought them coffee. Only when he drank it did he lose the taste of her mouth in his, but still he did not forget.

Away to the west, the flame burned, an isolated beacon beyond the myriad lights in Kirkuk.