‘So? What happened?’
‘They claimed that the money was rightfully theirs, and they had come to get it back. But it wasn’t theirs.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘Is it a Jewish head on the coins?’
Even Hudd smiled hearing this. He asked, ‘So you never helped them: anyone else been up here?’
‘They returned empty-handed, and hungry. My father said some Frenchmen climbed up here while I was in England. They claimed a cargo of money had been intended for brave French soldiers fighting the Germans in France. They wanted it back, but they were thieves. My father knew that it wasn’t theirs.’
‘How?’
‘He was a man of the world, and so doubted the existence of any such thing as a brave French soldier, besides . . .’
‘. . . it wasn’t a French head on the coins either, was it?’ I couldn’t resist finishing the sentence for him.
‘Precisely. George the Third. I always forget whether he was the mad one or not.’
‘What happened to them?’
He made an odd fluttering gesture with the fingers of one hand, and a grimace. It was as if he was saying, They went, and Don’t ask, but he said, ‘I wasn’t here then.’
After a pause the size of Mount Ararat he added, ‘Sadly some of them are still around. My women have one; he is a eunuch, of course.’
Inside myself I shuddered. I hope that I didn’t show it.
They stood around and watched as we packed. Now that he knew that the writing on it was Jewish Hudd had no more interest in the ID bracelet. He planted a stick deep in the Israeli’s grave, and hung the bracelet on it. The contrast to the lack of a marker on his man’s grave – or his own when his time came I presumed – could not have been stronger. We rode away on two placid ponies, with our gear tied behind us. Each of our ponies was attached to the saddle of Van’s donkey by a long halter, and followed it dutifully. All we had to do was hang on, and not get in each other’s way.
As we started out Van looked back at us from under his parasol and said, ‘The Jews came back. About two weeks ago . . .’ He turned away before he finished the sentence.
That Egyptian colonel had asked me to do as Lot’s wife, and not look back, and I had failed him. I didn’t fail this time. I didn’t glance back once at the black bomber. It took me all my concentration not to fall off the pony.
There’s no getting away from it, even a large and sumptuous mud house is still a house made out of mud. Van’s house was made of mud. You could see the hand prints on the wall where it had been patted into place. He proudly showed me some small hands a couple of feet from the ground.
‘Mine. I was only five years old and already building my own house.’
His was the largest of about twenty built against the inner wall of a mudbrick compound. From the outside the complex looked like a fort. More remarkably, large as it was, you couldn’t even see it until you were two hundred and fifty yards away, because it was the same colour as the ground all around it, and nestled in the shadow of one of those crumbling mountains.
‘Your RAF taught us how to do this,’ Van had said as we rode up to the gate. Its warped wood was bleached almost silver by the sun, and looked as hard as metal. His men were doing the hollering and shooting in the air thing again.
‘I’m in the RAF,’ I told him.
‘Don’t tell anyone that; they’ll kill you! The RAF bombed us out of our traditional tents and winter houses in the 1920s. We learned to build homes you couldn’t spot from the air, or from a distance. I’m educated enough to say thank you – with some irony – but my wives will have your balls if they find out.’
Hudd guffawed, and muttered, ‘Hard luck, Charlie. You’ll make a good soprano.’
I hate these bloody comedians; they’ve been around me all my life.
Van and I sat cross-legged on carpets in a small warm room, and shared a hookah. The smoke was cool and scented. I actually preferred a good old Navy Cut, but a guest has duties as well as a host. One of them is to keep his trap shut. Not always my strong point.
‘Tell me about your name,’ I asked him. ‘Last month I met an Egyptian colonel who believed that you could learn things about a man from his name.’
‘Şiwan Mohamed Van. It’s very straightforward, old boy. I was my father’s eldest son. He was the leader of our small family, a role I was bound to inherit. So he named me Şiwan, which means shepherd. That’s my job now, just like Jesus – I am the shepherd to my flock. My second name is Mohamed, the prophet’s name, which was also my father’s first name, and Van is the place from which our family originally came – Lake Van. There are several ways that Kurds construct their names, but ours is gaining in popularity: personal name, father’s name and then place name. Your Egyptian friend was therefore right. As soon as I told you my name, you also knew my father’s name, and where we were from.’
‘I’m just plain old Charles Aidan Bassett. I don’t know where the Aidan came from – some Irish saint, I believe. My father’s name is Albert. On my birth certificate it says I was born in Stoke-on-Trent, although I don’t know what my family was doing there.’
‘How large is your family, Charlie?’
‘I had a mother
