‘Don’t we all? And she’s not: she’s going to jump in. Look! What are you waiting for – go!’
He went after her. Suddenly, perhaps in anticipation of the water, she was moving quickly. A grotesque drunk man’s stagger on her broken feet.
‘Come back!’ he shouted. She paid him no heed.
‘She cannot get away,’ the officer shouted after him. ‘All must be accounted for.’
‘Stop!’ he called to her. ‘I order you to stop!’
Still, no response. It was as though she could not hear him, perhaps she was beyond hearing. If anything she picked up speed – still running with that odd, lopsided, staggering gait, dragging her children who were stumbling, struggling to keep up.
‘Stop!’
She continued to run.
It was the action of a moment, without thought. He raised his gun and aimed for that spot at the back of the neck and fired and the front of her head exploded outwards.
He felt something inside him fracture.
Later he would know it. That was the moment. Despite everything he might still have returned to him, the man he used to be, before that. After it, there could be no way back. And that was before the bullets began to run out, and became a precious commodity. Other means had to be found. The butts of rifles. A large enough rock. His bare hands.
Some of them went mad with what they had done. Often they were the ones who committed the worst acts. A kind of frenzy overtook them. It was a dislocation of the self. You could almost hear it. But though the thing inside him had fractured, he did not go mad. He envied them, because there was a kind of refuge in their madness, a lack of culpability. And sometimes he envied the dead more than the mad because they were blameless; now, if they had committed crimes then at least they had paid for them with their own blood. He envied Babek, who he had pitied, because he had never been asked to sacrifice this much. He had died without this burden upon him, without ever discovering the extent of his own potential depravity, without ever knowing what evil might exist within himself.
One night he staggered out of camp. He was thinking of that river, the Tigris, only a few miles away.
He had the half-formed idea of washing himself until all of it came off. And then diving in, though he had never been a strong swimmer, and letting it carry him away somewhere … to a place of peace.
He walked on his broken schoolteacher’s shoes for hours, but he did not find the water. So he walked further, into the night. He realised dimly that he must have missed the river, might indeed have been walking in the wrong direction entirely. But he could not stop. He walked until the first pink-tinged fingertips of dawn began to creep beneath the curtain of the night.
He only stopped walking when he heard the shout: ‘Halt! Who goes there?’
He had not discovered the river but he had found the enemy. The British, at the grisly end of their Mesapotamian campaign. Tired and sick and ready for retreat – and certainly not expecting anything like this, this unexpected boon. An enemy soldier practically offering himself up to be taken as a prisoner of war.
Anyone would think the fellow had gone completely mad.
The Traveller
I remember an almost impossible place, where you could walk over a bridge and hear fifteen different languages spoken at once; where you could cross between two continents in the time it took to eat a warm simit, to smoke a single cigarette.
I read of it obsessively in books. I discovered swathes of history. Byzantium: a great, sophisticated, democratic metropolis when most of England, which thought of itself as so ancient and civilised, had been little more than a collection of mud huts. The Romans had come and made it the new, eastern jewel of their empire. The emperor had loved it more than Rome, and had given it his name: Constantine. He had made it a place of pomp and splendour, colonnades and bathhouses and statues. Which would be crushed to rubble by the victorious Mehmet the Conqueror and his army. The Ottomans. Who would in their turn build structures of incomparable beauty: mosques with airy, burnished domes, minarets so delicate they looked as though they would not be able to stand the weight of the clouds they seemed to hold aloft.
And yet I did not find within these pages the truth of the place I was looking for. That city was a living place, full of creatures: stray cats sleeping in the midday sun; dogs roaming the streets, as gnarled and characterful in appearance as the old men who sat watching them. A sudden confetti of doves alighting in a garden beside the Bosphorus.
A city full of scents, too. Some of them bad: mackerel left out too long upon the quay; the unwashed bodies of people who had arrived upon huge ships and had no proper place to lay their heads. The smell of burned things, the peculiar odour of an entire life gone up in an evil greasy smoke: books and bedding and furniture and house and worse. But good scents, too: warm savoury fig leaves and jasmine flowers – tiny white stars against old stone – and the brine of the sea and the toasting of bread and the burned caramel of coffee and the pure sugar cloud that floated through the open door of a confectioner’s shop.
I wake and for several moments do not know where I am. A ship, I think – the listing motion, the feeling of confinement. Then I discover my surroundings: the dense foam cushion of the couchette beneath me, the small shard of dusty light beneath the window blind. I pull the cord, roll it up.
I am unprepared for the splendour of the view that greets me. When I last looked out all was in darkness, lit by
