Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

There was the same emptiness, and he blinked into the sun rising over the faraway ridges.

He was particularly cheerful that morning: his time in the army had nine days to run and then he would be on the slow bus back to an-Nahiya where his father kept a roadside coffee shop. The orderly did not realize that by standing and dragging contentedly on his cigarette he made a good target for a distant marksman. As he fell backwards the crows screamed and rose in a moment of panicked flight over the heap of rubbish bags.

They moved again, fast.

‘Why, Mr Gus?’

‘Because, Omar, they are available.’

‘I do not complain, Mr Gus, but they are not officers, not commanders. They are not helicopters, tanks, communications… Why?’

‘They wear the uniform.’

The boy shrugged. They went through yards, over fences that sometimes collapsed under them. There would have been many inside their homes or outside sweeping away dirt or hanging out clothes to dry who saw them. But those who were inside looked away and those who were outside hurried back through the doors and locked them. They were not in that part of the city where Party members lived, or functionaries of the administration, but where people valued their lives and believed the best preservation was to see, hear and know nothing. The boy carried the Kalashnikov assault weapon, and Gus held hard on to the stock of the big rifle as he ran. As the sun rose, they careered on, hunting for the next position from which he could find a target wearing the uniform. And gradually the pattern of the boy’s route led him towards the heart of the city.

He arrived at the military transport pool.

Major Karim Aziz thanked the driver curtly, hoisted up his backpack and the rifle’s polished wooden box. The dog ran beside him as he walked to the pool office. He gave his name and his rank at the desk, and demanded a self-drive car for his journey back to Baghdad. His name was known, his reputation had moved quickly. Surely, for the major, whose expert marksmanship was responsible for the capture of the witch, there was a place on a flight south to Baghdad?

‘I wish to drive and I want a car immediately.’

Beyond a closed door, behind the desk, he could vaguely hear the military radio net.

He could not distinguish the messages, only the babble of activity.

Forms were produced from below the desk, and carbon sheets. With two fingers, a clerk laboriously typed his name, his rank and his destination. He fidgeted impatiently.

He was asked if he wanted coffee, but irritably shook his head. He paced in front of the desk, and perhaps that increased the clerk’s nervousness and the errors; the papers and carbons were torn out of the typewriter and the work began again. When the typing was complete the papers were passed to him. He scrawled his signature on them, and they were taken from him into the office where the radio was… By now, Leila and the children would have left home, would be on the road towards Sulaiman Bak.

An officer, a major’s insignia on his shoulder, overweight from a life spent welded to a desk, came from the inner room.

‘I am honoured to meet you, Major Aziz. Did these fools not find you a chair?’

‘I don’t want a chair, I just want a car.’

With a flourish the officer countersigned the papers. ‘I apologize that I can only provide a Toyota, Major. As soon as it is valeted, fuelled, it will be at your disposal.’

‘Forget the valeting, give me the keys.’

The officer smiled smugly. ‘You are an expert at marksmanship, I am an expert at running the motor pool of Fifth Army. You have pride in your work, Major, and I have pride in mine. No car issued to a distinguished officer will leave this yard until it has been correctly cleaned and prepared. We are both proud men, yes?’

‘Just get it done.’

He started to pace again. The officer hesitated, then said uncertainly, ‘I am assuming, Major, that you have not been beside a radio for the last three-quarters of an hour.’

‘I have been getting here, in bad traffic.’

‘You do not know of the killings?’

‘What killings?’

‘Three soldiers have been shot dead in Kirkuk in the last three-quarters of an hour. A corporal on the airport road, a soldier at a road block, an orderly taking rubbish to the dump. Not important men, Major, not officers.’

‘Perhaps the remnants of the saboteurs from yesterday are still holed up, hiding.’

‘Each without any warning, each from an unseen rifle, each with a single bullet.’

She would be on the road coming north. She would be driving with their sons, and with her trust in him. Behind him was the cell block. He had thought the sniper had fled back to the mountains, beyond reach. He remembered the sun-hazed mirage of the man sitting on the rock at too great a range for the Dragunov. If she did not have trust in him she would not have taken the car, loaded it, and driven north.

‘Get the fuelling and the cleaning done quickly. I need to leave.’ *** She heard him cough, then hack the spittle from his throat.

Meda was sprawled in the furthest corner of the cell from the door. She heard him, then the long painful wheeze.

She twisted, each slight movement hurting her, and heard the gasps. She lay on a foul-smelling bed of old straw in a sleeve of stained cotton. She had not heard him so clearly before, but the last time they had brought her back to the cell, as she fell to the concrete floor, she had found that the bed had been moved from the left side of the cell to the right. Close to her face was warmth, a wet heat. Against the back wall of the cell, under the high, barred window where the dirt filtered the light, was a channel in the concrete, where water could run out when the floor was sluiced. The warmth and the heat were from urine dribbling out of a hole in the wall beside her head.

Her mouth was close to the drain, and the stumbling flow of his urine.

‘Are you there?’

‘Where else would I be? I am here.’ From the drain came a black, shaken chuckle, not laughter.

‘Can we survive?’

‘We have to survive.’

‘For how long?’

‘For as long as God gives us strength.’

‘Can we be saved?’

‘Only by death.’

She trembled. Between the interrogation sessions and the smiling soft-skinned face phrasing the questions with care in the intervals between the beatings and the pain, she had thought of home. She had summoned the image of the village, the orchards in blossom, the smell of food cooking and of wet wood burning, the children bringing back armfuls of wild spring flowers, and of old Hoyshar reading to her from the books of military history that had been left for him by his friend, esteemed brother Basil, children playing and shouting – but she could no longer find the image. All she had left were the words coming through the narrow drain hole and sighs as if the effort of speaking each word brought a worse pain.

‘When does death come?’

‘When they have finished with us – for you earlier, for me later.’

‘Can you not tell them something, a little?’

‘If you start, you weaken. Then it is not a little but everything.’

‘If you are strong?’

‘Today men pray for my strength that they can live.’

‘How do you make the strength?’

‘By thinking of those I love.’

‘May I be loved by you, because I am frightened.’

‘We will love each other, child and father…’

She closed her fist. She reached into the hole, pushing her hand, wrist, forearm, into it.

She felt the feathery brush of the cockroaches’ legs on her skin. In the rough hole, with the creatures on her, her arm shivered, but she thrust it deeper, to the elbow. She felt the coarse close-cut hair and thought she touched his neck, and he started at the touch and let out a small cry because he had moved suddenly. The big, hard hand took Meda’s. Her fingers were in his. She felt the wetness of his lips on her fingers, on the palm of her hand that had been burned with cigarette stubs. It was as if she reached beyond her cell, beyond the fences and walls, beyond the city, through the drain towards a freedom. It was not a father holding a child’s hand and kissing it, it was the hold and the kiss of the man she loved. She was alone with him, given strength, watching the same stars as shone over Nineveh and Nimrud… Gus would come for her, take her back into the night, to freedom, and she would feel again his lips kissing hers.