Karachi for cricket, hockey and soccer. To get out, if we had a few days’ leave, we hitched rides to Cyprus or Beirut – few of the officers and none of the men were permitted to travel inside Iraq.’
He was eighty-four years old, widowed for the last six. Willet thought the straightness of his back remarkable. Wearing worn carpet slippers, flannel pyjamas and a heavy dressing gown, he’d let them in, sat them down, then excused himself with old-world politeness. He’d come back still dressed in the slippers, pyjamas and dressing gown, but shaven and with his fine silver hair carefully combed. He’d checked their identity cards, then eased into a high wing-backed chair. He hadn’t challenged them, had seemed in fact to have expected them.
‘You passed on a letter to your grandson, Augustus Peake.’
‘Patience, my dear, always a virtue… We had two squadrons of Vampire fighter-bombers there. It was a troubled little corner of the world, the Soviet border was less than an hour’s flying away, and we had the transports coming through. They used to put down on Malta, then reach us, then go on to East Africa or the Red Sea, or keep going east to Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea. Most of the transports were Hastings, 53 Squadron.
They came in and went out in the early morning; that’s when everyone did their day’s work. After that, in the heat – mad dogs and Englishmen stuff – we played sport. In the evening, officers anyway, we dressed for dinner, drank, ate, drank, played cards or took in a film in the open-air cinema, drank, and went to bed. We had to wear our issue greatcoats over our pyjamas, it was so damned cold. An evening a week, I was out on guard duty in support of the RAF regiment, shooting at shadows out of our trenches – the Arabs would steal anything they could creep in and get their hands on. It was damned dull. That wasn’t good enough for me. All I saw of the local culture was the traders at the main gate, nomads crossing the desert, and the thieves looking for a gap in our defences at night. What a waste… Barbara – that’s my wife – wrote to me from the married quarters in Lyneham and pointed out what was just over the horizon. Well, not exactly -about two hundred miles, actually. Antiquities. Do you know anything about antiquities, my dear?’
‘No, I don’t, but I expect you’re going to tell me.’
A myth, handed from grandfather to child, says that the Ark of Noah grounded as the floods fell back on the summit of Mount Cudi in present-day Iraq, 4,490 years before the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. The survivors were the first Kurds.
They were, through history, a warrior people.
Another myth, from ancient Jewish lore, tells that four hundred virgins were taken out of Europe by devil spirits who had been exiled from the court of Solomon, the djinn, to the Zagros mountains and their bastard children became the unique and isolated Kurds.
Xenophon wrote of the retreat of 10,000 Greek soldiers towards their homeland after defeat by Cyrus of Persia, and a week-long epic battle through the mountain passes, harried by the ferocious Carduchi tribesmen. The victor over the Crusader king, Richard the Lionheart of England, at Hittin by the Sea of Galilee was Salah al-Din Yusuf, the Kurd known in medieval Europe as Saladin. Kurds fought on both sides in the war of total barbarity, four hundred years ago, between Beg Ustajlu and Selim the Cruel. As irregular soldiers, toughened by the physical hardship of life in the mountains, they were employed occasionally by the governments of Britain, France and Russia. But the reward never came… their own country was never given to them. When their usefulness was past they were as bones thrown from the table.
They were an image of the fallen stones from temples and palaces, scattered, antiquities.
Willet saw her fidget. The page in front of him, under LETTER and MOTIVATION was blank, but he was rather enjoying the story and it didn’t seem to matter that he hadn’t an idea where it was going.
‘There I was, sitting at Habbaniyah, bored out of my mind, and six hours’ drive to the north were the ruined cities of Nineveh and Nimrud. I obtained permission, took a car from the motor pool with a driver. We had a couple of tents, some food, service revolvers and a rifle, and off we went – the first time. That evening, humbled by the sense of place and time, I walked in the ruins of Nineveh. I actually saw – some blighter’s hacked it out and stolen it now – the alabaster carvings in the ruins of King Sennacherib’s palace, in his throne room, and he died 2,680 years ago. The next morning we drove the few miles to Nimrud. There, I stood amongst the fallen stones of the palace where King Ashurnasirpal the Second is said to have entertained 69,500 guests. I mean, your mind just falls apart in such a place. There’s an observatory there where they studied the stars in the ninth century BC. We had to get back, and, sod’s law, the bloody car wouldn’t start.
Had the bonnet up but couldn’t get a spark of life out of her… A local wandered by, quite a different dress and stance to the Arabs down at Habbaniyah, watched us for a bit, then came close. The driver thought he was going to steal something from the car and drew his damn revolver. No, he didn’t shoot him. I’m not mechanical but the local had a poke about – cleaned something, put it all back in place, then climbed into the driving seat, started her up, and she was as sweet as new. He wouldn’t take any money. He was the first Kurd I ever met. His name was Hoyshar.’
Willet thought they were getting there, in the old man’s own time.
‘I went back a couple of times with the driver. It was purgatory for the poor fellow. He had no interest whatsoever in me picking around among the stones, giving a hand to the three German archaeologists at Nimrud – that became my favourite. He used to find some shade and sit down with a comic book, and this man, my age, Hoyshar, was always there and he worked on the engine and polished the bodywork so that it gleamed, never would take any money… The third time I wanted to go the driver was sick and no-one else was available. I had permission to go on my own. Hoyshar was waiting. It’s a damn strange language the Kurds have, extraordinary, but, there are English roots. “Earth” is erd,
“new” is new, a “drop” of water is a dlop. We got to be able to speak to each other; it was a bit like a comedy sketch but we understood what the other said. He drove me back to Habbaniyah, drove excellently, and took a bus home to the mountains. It became a routine. Every two weeks I’d drive from the motor pool to just outside the main gate, he’d be there, and he’d drive all the way to Nimrud, and then he’d bring me south again.
‘By the fourth or fifth time I went up there – and I was then the only married officer who had ever applied for an extension to his posting at Habbaniyah – I’d stopped going to the kitchens for packed meals. Hoyshar brought all the food we needed. Yoghurt, apricot jam because I was important, bread, goat’s cheese, dried meat… He was old enough to remember the RAF bombing his village, knocking the tribes into submission before the Second World War, but didn’t seem to hold it against me. Always he refused money, so I used to take him books. If you went into his house now you’d probably find a stack of them, stamped “RAF HABBANIYAH: LIBRARY”, mostly military history. At night, when it was too dark to work on the site with the Germans, we’d sit outside the tents. I’d learn about his people and he’d learn about mine. The seventh or eighth time, he brought me clothes to change into, those baggy trousers they wear and the loose shirts. I was going a bit native… That was it, scratching around for fragments of pottery, scraps of glass and gold from necklaces and earrings in the day, and talking at night… Do you know, my dear, that King Tiglath-Pileser the Third, from Nimrud, ruled an empire he had himself conquered that stretched from Azerbaijan to Syria to the Persian Gulf? Think of it, the scale of the civilization – and we were wearing skins and living in caves… I used to feel, every time I was there, privileged, and doubly privileged to be with such a man as Hoyshar.’
There was, Willet noted, a slight wetness at the old man’s eyes. He blinked as if to clear it.
‘At the end, before I went home, I was taken to his village. None of his family, and none of the other Kurds there, had ever seen a European. I slept in his bed, and he and his wife slept on the floor. I was shown the tail fins of a bomb that the RAF had dropped on the village twenty-something years before. If I had not been with Hoyshar the men of the village would have slit my throat, probably after cutting off an appendage… He is the grandest man I’ve ever known, my friend Hoyshar. I’m not a blinkered Arabist, and I hope I never stoop to patronizing the “noble savage”.’
The old man paused, screwed his eyes shut, opened them, closed them again, then flickered the lids. His angular jaw jutted. The wetness was gone, the moment of weakness banished. Willet realized that some trauma had been released in the talk of the bare detail of the night in the village. He didn’t think the former wing commander would degrade himself with a lie but he thought him capable of parsimony with the truth. He wondered whether he should interrupt and probe, but he was not the trained interrogator. She was.
He had already begun to doubt his first instinct by the time composure was regained and the voice continued the story.
‘What he wanted was freedom, for himself, his family and for his people. As a mature man, aged thirty-one, he stood in the Circle in the middle of Mahabad, that’s across the Iranian border, and saw Qazi Muhammad hanged
