Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

Ms Manning asked, ‘What did Dr Williams tell him?’

‘I didn’t listen that closely – Fred’s the expert, you see. We hear it every lunchtime in the mess, his views on the Iraqi armed forces – myself, I think he’s slightly overrated.

Anyway, a resume to give an idea of the usual lecture. The Iraqis are a defensively minded and centralized military machine. Faced with the unexpected, they will be slow to react because middle-ranking officers are not able to take field decisions. So, at first, they can be caught out, lose ground and positions. Once they’ve steadied their nerve and had orders from on high they are efficient. That was the germ of it – a sudden attack will make early advances, then there will be a regrouping, consolidation, counter-attack… then reprisals. I don’t think he’d thought of that. He was jolted. I’d wager my shirt on Fred having the right appraisal of that scenario, but it is pretty obvious. The insurgents -

Kurds, yes? – would go through villages and towns, and think they were a force of liberation, but God help the poor bastards who cheered them. It’s the same through history – do you know your ‘Forty-five rebellion? The Young Pretender marched south and took Carlisle, Lancaster, Manchester, and idiots cheered him to the roof, but they were backing a loser. There’s always some nasty little creature who remembers who cheered the liberators loudest, who is going to dangle from a rope when the tables are turned – there were a great number of hangings in those northern English cities when the Highland army retreated… Back in Iraq, the same is true – the reprisals would be brutal.

He went very quiet, like the wind was out of his sails. Fred told him about the terrain he’d be in, a little about how to cope with hunger, thirst, lack of sleep, heat. Then I chipped in.’

‘What exactly was your contribution?’ Willet asked drily. He had taken a fast and certain dislike to the psychiatrist. Perhaps it was the time in the morning, dawn not yet on them, perhaps it was the man’s flamboyant bow-tie of vivid green and primrose yellow, perhaps it was the long hair gathered at the back of his head with an elastic band.

‘If I’d reckoned him a mere psychopath, I’d have stayed quiet.’

Willet persisted, ‘What would interest a psychiatrist like you?’

Rupert Helps beamed, and preened pleasure at being asked for his expert opinion.

‘He’s not a rounded man. I assessed him as an innocent, rather juvenile – a child, unwilling to grow up and shed a world of romance, but decent. You with me? Peter Pan syndrome. The talk of reprisals was the give-away.’

‘Sorry, but you haven’t told me what your contribution was.’

‘I told him to forget it. He should nurse his own problems and ignore other people’s difficulties. I said he should put himself first.’

Ms Manning gazed into the psychiatrist’s face. ‘Did you expand on that opinion?’

‘You know-’

‘No, certainly I don’t.’ Willet thought she was a cat, about to pounce, ready for the kill.

‘Be so kind as to tell me.’

‘Well, because he seemed to be searching for fulfilment, I suggested he should push at work for promotion, never said what his job was. I didn’t gather that he was in a very meaningful relationship – he could put more effort into that. He should find a hobby and develop it further. He could move home, get a garden, have a larger mortgage and therefore self-inflict the pressure to earn more through greater endeavour. If he needed to do good works I told him to drive at weekends for the elderly or the sick… I was trying to help. Did he go?’

She said brutally, ‘Oh, yes, he went, completely ignored you.’

‘Has he survived?’

The steel was in her voice. ‘We don’t know. We have very little access to intelligence from that region. Tomorrow I have a meeting at which I may find something out. Isn’t there more to living than work, loving, hobbies, mortgages, charities? Shouldn’t we rejoice that one man, alone among the dross, climbs towards further horizons?’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘What don’t I understand?’

‘If he survives, he’ll be damaged. He won’t win, can’t. Should he make it back, he’ll be a damaged, altered man. I was just trying to help, damn you. He can’t win, and it will all be for nothing – dead or damaged.’

She rose imperiously, ‘Thank you. Perhaps that’s a worthwhile sacrifice. Come on.’

Willet followed her out. They passed a column of cadets starting out on a cross-country run.

‘The pompous bastard didn’t even offer us coffee, gets us out of bed as though he’s the only one with an important day, and no bloody coffee,’ he said. ‘Well done for putting him down, laying him out on the floor like that.’

‘Don’t patronize me.’

It was a brilliant dawn of ochre and gold and red thrown up from behind the mountains in the west. The dawn was a flame to which two men were drawn.

‘Will you send my body back to the mountains?’

The commander seemed to ponder that last request. They were in her cell, the door open behind him. He seemed to think on it as if he were slightly confused. He had taken no part in the stripping of her military clothes, and army boots, and had looked to the ceiling when she was naked, before the smock of white cotton was lifted over her head and her arms were threaded into the sleeves. She was calm, stiff and awkward but he had heard on the speakers in the office the mewling of the wretch in the adjacent cell and he had heard the last faint words of comfort she had given him. Most men, officers in the army, asked for a cigarette and panted on it before it was taken from their mouths, discarded on the cell’s floor and they were led out. The cigarettes lay on the floor half-smoked, still burning by the time the execution had been completed. He would not have admitted to being a man invested with cruelty, but he was keen on the bureaucracy entailed in his work as a shield to the state.

He looked into Meda’s face. Her hair was held close against her head with a cloth bandanna. He could understand why men had followed her. If the shield he held was lowered, if the regime became vulnerable, if he – himself – were about to be led out, he would not be given an opportunity to make a last request. There would be sons, fathers, uncles and nephews, cousins of those he had sent to their deaths that the regime might survive, crowding around him and kicking, punching, spitting. No cigarette would be lit for him before he was lifted up under the lamp-post or the telegraph pole. He thought of what she asked. If the regime fell he knew what would become of his beloved grandchildren. It was her very calmness that disturbed him.

He answered her quietly, ‘I promise your body will be sent back to the mountains…’

‘Thank you.’

‘… when your family have paid the price of the rope.’

There was a titter of laughter from the men who held her and fastened the thong on her wrists behind her back. He had sought to destroy the calm, but her eyes were unwavering and beading into his. He saw the contempt, and understood better why men had followed her – and why agha Ibrahim in Arbil and agha Bekir had not lifted the telephone and pleaded with Baghdad for her life. He broke the hold of her eyes and looked at the wall where other wretches had written their names and the dates on which they had been taken from the cell, but noticed that she had not bothered to do so.

‘It is time,’ he said brusquely. ‘Move her.’

They took her out quickly and her feet, in plain plastic sandals, scraped the floor. They dragged her from his sight.

He heard her cry out in the corridor, ‘Be strong, friend, be brave. Remember those who depend on you…’