‘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.
‘He will come and save me.’
‘No-one will come. The only safety is death.’
‘I have to believe it.’
‘If you believe it then you will be weak. Be strong, give me strength.’
‘You were my enemy.’
‘I am all you have, you are all I have.’
‘I will be saved…’
Meda tried to drag her arm back from the drain hole, but she could not. He held her hand with the firmness of desperation.
‘She is only a girl, a peasant. We are responsible.’
Etiquette said that Haquim, already offered coffee in a thimble china cup and sweet biscuits, should have taken the chair, upholstered in royal blue, and sat opposite agha Ibrahim and engaged in polite talk before gently steering the conversation towards the reason for his visit. He was incapable of such courtesies. The coffee remained untouched on the low table, the biscuits uneaten. He roamed the salon room, beating out a stride, then turning and gesticulating with his finger for emphasis. The room had been the principal lounge of the hotel that had once been a retreat for the privileged of the regime when they came north to escape the heat of Baghdad’s summer; it was now the commandeered residence of the agha, and the old opulence was maintained. Haquim’s boots, as he pounded backwards and forwards, scattered dried mud on a hand-woven carpet.
‘She had dreams, delusions. We played on her simplicity. We have a duty to her.’
The agha ’s eyes followed Haquim. The only evidence of his mood and inclination was in the eyes. The hands were still, did not fidget. The mouth was set, expressionless. But agha Ibrahim could not hide the message of his eyes. Haquim was heard out in silence, but knew he had failed. Nothing would be done, a finger would not be lifted. As he spoke he seemed to see her in the cell, just as he had seen her in the village, just as he had seen her in the charge of the Victory City and on the stampede towards the town of Tarjil, and the rush along the ditch beside the high-built road to the perimeter defences at the crossroads. Because of what he saw, and the memory of the way she trapped him with innocence and certainty, his voice rose.
‘She took you to the outskirts of Kirkuk. You saw the flame of Baba Gurgur. When you turned, it was a betrayal of her. History will curse you, and the spirit of your father and your grandfather, if you abandon her.’
The passion of the veteran fighter went unanswered. No man, certainly no woman, spoke to agha Ibrahim with such disdain. Haquim thought that the call would already have been made on the satellite telephone to the palace offices in Baghdad and that there would have been the protestations of loyalty; but it would not be admitted. He thought he shouted to the wind.
‘I beg of you, use the communications you have. Call them and plead and bargain with them. Offer them what they want.’
Perhaps, if he had wished to, the agha could have saved her. If he had picked up again the satellite telephone and begged, pleaded, perhaps her life could be returned to her.
Perhaps, for a quarter or half a million dollars, of the customs tolls exacted by the agha for permission for lorries and tankers to cross his territory, her life could be won. The slight shrug told Haquim that nothing would be done, that the interview was terminated.
‘She did it for you. She risked her life to bring you to Kirkuk. Your indifference shames you.’
He had expected nothing more and nothing less, but it had been his obligation to try.
He would drive from Arbil to Sulaymaniyah, and if the answer was the same he would go back to the mountains, to his village, to forget. He stamped out of the salon room.
The soldier in the watchtower at the fuel depot was high above the traffic on the nearest street.
He had heard two shots fired with thirty minutes separating them but, and he checked his wristwatch again, the second shot had been eighteen minutes before. The soldier strained to hear another shot but it was harder now because a mullah called the faithful to prayer and the chant billowed out from the loud-speakers in the minaret
