Gerald Seymour: Holding the Zero

Gus let them look at the rifle, but he would not let them touch, feel or hold it.

He counted forty-two of them. There were forty-one men and a boy. He was slim, had stick-like wrists and a thin throat. On the smooth complexion of his cheeks and upper lip there was a haze of fluff, as if he was trying to grow a man’s beard. Most of the men were middle-aged, some shaven and some bearded, some in fatigues and some in their own tribal clothes. There was one who pressed closer than the others – turbaned, an old torn check shirt under a grey-blue anorak with a face masked by stubble and dangerous flitting eyes. They were bad, hostile eyes, and they raked him. His mouth had narrow lips, between which the tongue was turned and rolled in the mouth to gather the spittle. It was directed down between his boots. There was the single croaked word, spoken with contempt: ‘American.’

Gus stared back into the man’s face, shook his head and said, ‘English.’ He saw the eyes and mouth relax, then the man turned his back on him.

He thought them proud men, but with the common features of cruel eyes and brutal mouths. His grandfather would have described them, in the language of long ago, as

‘villains’. They carried assault rifles and grenade launchers; one had a light machine-gun and was wrapped with belts of ammunition. Then, in a moment, he was no longer the centre of attention because they had seen her, Meda.

They were around her. She spoke softly, with the glow in her eyes. They hung on her words. The one who’d spat, his mouth gaped open as if the foul old bastard had found the light of God and was mesmerized. Gus thought they danced for her.

Haquim, at his shoulder, said, ‘I can tell them about the tactics of frontal attack, and about clearing trenches with grenades, and about enfilading fire, and they tolerate me.

She tells them of destiny and freedom, and they will follow wherever she leads. I fear where she will lead us, Mr Peake.’

‘When are we leaving?’

Haquim said dully, ‘We go when she says we go.’

‘I counted forty-two new men – is that enough?’

‘Forty-one men and a boy, Mr Peake. Forty-one fighters and a boy to wash and cook for them. And there were eighteen of us, and you, and her. You go to war, Mr Peake, with fifty-nine men, a boy and her… It is what we have, it has to be enough. I told you it would be a drip feed. Today, agha Bekir has sent us forty-one men and a boy from the slum camps of Sulaymaniyah. In Arbil, agha Ibrahim will watch to see if we are successful. If we are he will not wish to lose status and he will send a hundred men, who will also be the scum from the slums. I told you how it would be.’

Her hands moved, outstretched, as she spoke. They seemed capable of carrying the weight of the world. He watched the power with which she held them, then ducked inside the shed.

When he came out, the rucksack and the carrying case hooked over his shoulders, Meda was leading and they were following up the narrow paths on the cliff face that generations of sheep had made. He heard their singing, in quiet, throaty voices. Haquim was ahead of him, labouring over the rocks. He climbed slowly and carefully, never looking back or down. Around him, he heard the songs of men going to war.

Sarah stood by the two Landcruisers, the bodyguards crowded around her. The customs men on the Syrian side of the river were waving urgently for him to hurry, and the man in the ferry-boat was shouting for him. Her regional director kissed her awkwardly on the cheek. She didn’t know whether she believed what he’d said, that he worried more about her than any of his other field people. When he was back in his London home, with his wife or partner or boyfriend, would he be worrying about her? The visits were little light lines in the darkness of her everyday life, but they unsettled her. It would take a week to reassemble her existence, fall back into the routine of the isolation and exposure to suffering that were commonplace.

‘Keep safe, Sarah.’

‘Give my love to the office,’ she said flatly.

‘I’m going to do what I said I’d do.’

‘What’s that?’

‘British snipers hazarding your safety… raise hell.’

Under the glare of the afternoon sun he scrambled down the track towards the ferry.

She waved desultorily. She watched him climb aboard and the ferry carried him across the Tigris, towards Syrian territory, towards safety. Tomorrow she would be back in the high villages and her concern would be for children who had no school, no clinic and no hope. What could one sniper do, however fucking expert, however big his fucking rifle, to give the children hope, a clinic and a school? The ferry reached the far side of the river, and he ran to the car that would drive him to the airstrip for the feeder flight to Damascus.

She shouted after him, ‘I hope your back’s better in the morning. Don’t tell them in the office that you did it getting the Cruiser back on the road. Tell them you were escaping from a battalion of the Republican Guard…’

Gus had made the climb up the far side of the valley his bullet had crossed.

Only once before had he stood, silent, and looked down on the dead. Then, more than nine years before, he had steeled himself, erect, tall, and adopted a concerned expression.

Hands had plucked at the sleeves of his coat and led him between the clusters of wrapped shapes. He had tried, then, to close his ears to the persistence of the sobbing of the living.

Men had wept and women had cried out in their anguish and the tears had rolled down children’s cheeks. He could remember, then, that he had worried how they would bury so many bodies because there was little earth between the rock outcrops and that was frozen under the sporadic patches of snow. He could remember the endless crawling line of people coming down a track on a far slope towards the swaying rope bridge with their bundles, bags, cases and more dead. Sometimes, that was clear in his mind, the cloths that wrapped the corpses had been unwound so that he could see the faces of the dead, as if it was important to those who lived that he should share with them the agony of their loss.

They had died from hunger, thirst, cold, exhaustion, from wounds into which gangrene gas had spread infection, and from the cruelty of eccentric accidents. She had been with him as he had toured the panorama of the dead, always behind him and never speaking, never interrupting her father and grandfather, never weeping, never crying out. Her gaze had been impassive as her father had drawn back blankets and sacking to show the crushed faces of her sister and brother killed by a pallet of grain bags parachuted down from an American mercy flight. He had witnessed her strength.

Before they had left, then, the mountain slope of tents and plastic sheeting, the shivering living and the cold dead, he had said the unthinking words that he had mouthed several times before and since. At the doors of English crematoria and at the gates of cemeteries, he had taken the hands of mothers, widows and daughters, and murmured, ‘If there’s anything I can ever do to help, absolutely anything, then make contact, and I’ll do my best…’ It had been the decent thing to say. Empty words spoken before he had turned his back and hurried for the border, the car, the hotel and a damn great drink, all long ago, and the chance to put the dead from his mind.

Again, he saw the dead.

Again, the plucking hands pulled him forward.

The flies were on the face. They flew, buzzed, settled around the gaping mouth and the wide stare of the eyes and over the stubble set in the opaque skin. He saw a fly go into the man’s mouth while another rested on his eyeball.

Gus was brought closer.

He wanted to shrug their hands off him but he did not, could not. There was a pool of blood on the chest and more blood, which had earlier seeped from the hole in the corpse’s back. That, too, was a focus of the flies’ feeding frenzy. The coat and shirt that the living body would have dragged on in the dawn cold a few minutes before its owner’s death were pulled back to reveal the matted chest hair and the neatly drilled hole into which a pencil or a biro, of less than. 338 diameter, would have fitted comfortably. He remembered the moment at which he had fired, as the target had seemed to arch his back and his head had tilted to face the heavens and his god, to drink the freshness of the air. A man clawed a hand around his shoulder and cackled, squeezing his flesh as if to offer congratulations at the accuracy of the shot. He thought he belonged. A bullet of. 338 calibre moving at supersonic velocity, killing, had won him the respect of the men crowded close to him.