Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

He walked across the square towards the side-street into which the driver had swerved the jeep. He found the man half hiding under the vehicle, stood over him, exposed, and gave the instruction that his backpack and the box should be returned to his old room.

With his rifle in his hands, his dog beside him, Major Karim Aziz stood in the centre of the square and stared up the length of the road at a thousand windows and a hundred roofs.

She heard the boots and the dragging slither as if a weighted sack were brought down the corridor, and the weight collapsed beside the darkness of the drain hole. The door slammed and the boots receded. Her mouth was beside the hole.

‘Did you hear it?

‘I heard only their questions – and I did not answer. I had the strength…’

‘Did you hear the shot?’

‘You had given me the strength, your love…’

‘He was there, with his rifle. He is coming.’

‘Give me your hand… No-one is coming, only death. Give me your hand, I beg you.’

‘I heard the shot…’

‘A man makes a gesture, clears his conscience, then goes… Only I can help you, child, only you can help me.’

She put her hand, her wrist and arm, back into the drain.

His family would be pulling into the fuel station – hot, tired, fractious and looking for him.

Major Karim Aziz came out of the medical unit. The gate sentry might live and he might die. He was escorted by a doctor who thanked him sheepishly, and explained again, uselessly, why a wounded man had been left in the road to bleed without help. The doctor said that the sniper had made a corridor of fear that ordinary men did not have the courage to enter. The doctor wheedled congratulations at the major’s bravery, but Aziz walked on and left the man babbling behind him. He had a fresh, urgent step as if a reason for living had again been given him.

The boys would be spilling from the car and complaining to their mother; her temper would be short and she would be barking at them.

He was walking towards the command bunker when his name was shouted from behind him. He walked on, but his name was called again in a thin, nasal voice. He stopped, turned slowly. He thought that Commander Yusuf, the man who was said to harbour an obsessive love of his grandchildren, was breaking again for coffee or for biscuits. There were more blood spatters on the tunics and trousers of the brutes with him; they would not have changed into new uniforms because it was part of the terror they strewed around them that the pain they inflicted should be seen in the bunker and in the officers’ quarters.

‘You came back, Major.’

‘I had thought my duty here was finished, Commander Yusuf. I returned when I realized that was not the case.’

‘You are a sniper, Major,’ the torturer said, with distaste. ‘You understand the psychology of this cowardly killing.’

Aziz stood his ground. ‘The man who came into Kirkuk this morning was not a coward.’

‘Soldiers without military significance were butchered – a fox amongst chickens. Is that not the work of a coward?’

‘I came back to shoot him but he is not a coward, Commander. He is no more a coward than the man who, in the name of the state, tortures and mutilates the body of a defenceless prisoner.’

His words died. The men around the commander, the heavy-set, cold-faced beasts, stiffened, and he saw the menace in their eyes, but the commander laughed. The dog bared its teeth.

‘Is he, Major, as much a hero as yourself?’

Major Karim Aziz said quietly, ‘He is a brave man, Commander, but I am also certain that it requires great courage – in the name of the state – to interrogate a bound captive.’

The eyes watching him were amused.

‘Come.’

The commander took his arm, gripped it with his narrow fingers. The hand was against the body of the rifle that he carried loosely in the crook of his elbow. The dog scampered warily beside him, and the brutes made a phalanx behind him. He thought he was as much of a prisoner as the wretches in the cells. His vanity had made him turn.

Pacing around the petrol station, she would be telling the children their father would come soon and wondering where he was.

He did not try to break the grip of the fingers. He was led, taken, into the building used by the Estikhabarat. The boots stamped in rhythm behind him. He was brought into a room that was fragrantly scented with air-freshener, and there were flowers on the table.

He saw a desk with papers from files piled on it, and beside the files was a framed photograph of the commander sitting on a sand beach with near-naked children beside him. On the far side of the room a tape-recorder’s spools turned, and another of the brutes, headphones on a shaven skull, sat at the table and wrote busily. Aziz was offered an easy chair and settled into it. Did he want coffee? He shook his head, but asked if water could be brought for his dog.

The commander walked to the tape-recorder and threw a switch. The sound burst into the room. As if confined in a minuscule space, a guttering, hacking cough came from the speakers, then a slow moan of pain.

‘Be strong. We are together. Together we are strong.’

‘I told them nothing.’

He heard the wheezed words of the brigadier, the Boot, and her small, timid voice. He stared expressionlessly ahead of him. The commander had lit a cigarette and was glancing with studied casualness at the front page of the regime’s morning newspaper.

His conceit had brought him back, and his wife and his children were waiting, would now be anxious because he was late meeting them.

‘They ask me, always, who gave me my orders – which officers? The Americans? The pigs, Ibrahim and Bekir? I can tell them nothing because the pigs and the Americans gave me no orders. I have not told them of when we met…’

He forced himself to listen to the whispered, frightened, hurt voice.

‘I have told them nothing. If it were not for your strength I would have broken…’

‘Hold my hand tighter.’

‘I hold it and I love it as if it were my family.’

‘Hold my hand because I am afraid.’

‘When you are close, with me, I can survive the pain.’

‘How long can we last?’

‘Long enough, I pray, for others to escape.’

‘What was your dream?’

‘I was told I would be the Minister of Defence.’ There was the bitter whinge of his laughter, and the slight motion in his body would have hurt him, because he moaned again. ‘I was told I would be a great man in the new Iraq. I was told…’

The pain of his gasp sighed in her ear. She felt the grip of his hand slacken and wondered whether he had drifted towards unconsciousness. The comfort she had felt when she had heard the single shot – the faraway crack and the close-by thump – were long gone. In a wild moment of excitement, she had thought that a crescendo of firing would burst around her, and that there would be the fear-driven cries of men in the corridor as they ran and, in the delirium of her terror, she had seen the cell door open and he would have been there with the rifle and would have caught her up in his arms and carried her from this hellish place… But there had been only the one shot and it was long gone, and she had cursed him for not coming, for being safe.

‘Hold me, you have to, hold me.’

‘I am holding you.’

She felt the tightening of his fingers on hers, as if she had brought him back to the living, as if she were not alone.

‘Hold me because I am afraid, and have nothing to tell them.’

‘What is your dream?’

‘To be in my village, to be a woman, to be free.’

‘Without you, I cannot protect them, buy them their time to escape.’