The corporal believed that his ribs were broken and he felt the blood on his face. He listened to what the goatherd told the captain, and it was a second thread on which his life rested.
‘It was a long shot that killed my friend who was a true and loyal servant of the Iraqi army, and the same long shot this morning took the honoured life of the officer. I saw the man who fires the long shots. Yesterday afternoon, before he went to walk in the night towards the place where he shot the officer, he sat outside my friend’s house. He has a big rifle, the devil’s rifle, bigger than I have and you have. I do not think he is a peshmerga. He wore clothes that also I have never seen before. It is only when he moves that you see him. If he does not move then he is like a rock or a pile of earth. I have never seen a man like this devil before.’
The corporal reached forward and took the ankle of the goatherd and held it tight, as if to thank him for the saving of his life.
He crawled to his feet and he was not kicked, not hit. He heard the captain inside his room shouting on the radio.
He whispered to the goatherd, ‘You did not tell them about the woman…’
‘I told them what would be believed.’
It was his birthday, and he had forgotten it.
When he had woken that morning, after three hours’ sleep, the children had been round the bed and had shaken him so that he could open the presents they had brought him. His elder son had given him a pen of sterling silver, and he had unwrapped the white shirt offered by his younger son. His wife’s present was a narrow gold ring that fitted easily onto the little finger of his right hand. He had kissed each of them, and thanked them hoarsely.
Major Karim Aziz had gone to work in his office at the Baghdad Military College, and in the afternoon he had locked his door, pulled down the blinds, put his feet on the desk and slept for two and a quarter precious hours. As he slept, the fingers of his left hand clutched the gold ring. Before drifting off, he had thought that it was as though Leila sought to bring him back to her, to wrestle him from the grasp of devils. It had been a good, deep sleep, free of dreams and nightmares.
He had returned home refreshed for the family meal in celebration of his forty-fifth birthday. The children had changed from their school uniforms to their best clothes, his wife wore a fine blouse of Indian silk, her father was in his favourite suit and her mother in the dress she took out of the cupboard only on special occasions. At another time, on another day, he would have criticized his wife for the extravagance of the presents and the cost of the food she served, and there was a bottle of Lebanese wine that had been imported across the Jordanian border. But the wine poured for him stayed in his glass, because he did not dare to cloud his mind. He picked at the rice and cubes of curried beef and ate little, because he didn’t dare to fill his stomach with food. What hurt most, they all tried so hard to make it a happy day for him… and he could tell them nothing.
He resented what they had spent on him. Only at work, only at the Baghdad Military College, was his life not subject to the sapping frustration caused by the shortages. An American had said that Iraq would be bombed back to the Stone Age of history.
And what else was there to talk about around the table? Any conversation inevitably entailed more discussion of the shortages, whether in the street markets, at school or the children’s hospital. He ate little and drank nothing, and the silences around the table grew longer.
The telephone rang. Wafiq ran to answer it, hurrying to escape the quiet of the celebration.
A year after his marriage he had been posted to the Soviet Union for six months to learn infantry tactics. He had written to his wife twice every week while he was away, and babbled conversation to her of what he had seen for days after his return. Two years later he had been in Lebanon’s Beka’a Valley teaching those tactics to militiamen, and he had told her everything when he had come home. On leave from the battle fronts of Khorramshahr and Susangerd, he had written home of the war with Iran – careful letters that would not offend the censors – and he had talked to her on leave, walking on the esplanades beside the Tigris river where he would not be heard, of the horror of the street fighting. He had held back nothing of his times in Kirkuk and Mosul and Arbil in the north. Everything he had seen in Kuwait City, at the start and at the end, when he had fled from the advance of the American tanks on the charnel-house road through the Mutla Pass, he had shared with her, because he loved her. Now, he had nothing to talk of, and he pecked at his food, and her eyes never left the ring she had given him.
The boy came back, said the call was for him.
He pushed aside his plate, scraped back his chair, and went into the hallway. He lifted the telephone and gave his name.
The call was from a duty officer at the al-Rashid camp of the Military Intelligence, the Estikhabarat. He was ordered to attend the al-Rashid camp at nine o’clock the following morning. The call was terminated.
He rocked on his feet. It was a familiar pattern, known about by every officer of his rank and experience but never talked of. The Estikhabarat always summoned a suspect to the al-Rashid barracks, but watched his home through the night to see if he fled, and to block him if he did. He knew of such calls, and of the desks cleared the following day by strangers, then occupied by new men, and of the officers who were never seen again after they had travelled to the al-Rashid complex.
Major Karim Aziz breathed hard, and the sweat ran on his stomach and down the small of his back.
Around the table, beyond his sight and reach, his family – everyone he loved – was waiting for his return and wondering why he was so troubled.
He went into the bedroom, took his heavy coat from the hook on the door, and knelt to pull the sports bag out from under the bed. From the small cupboard beside the bed, always locked and closed from the sight of his wife and his sons, he took a Makharov automatic pistol and a single hand grenade. It was possible, with planning, for a general to cross the frontier if he used his authority, or his relatives, or a dignitary, but for a major at the Baghdad Military College, with his family, it would be a journey of exceptional difficulty. He put the hand grenade under his shirt, tightened his belt so that it could not slip down, and reassured himself that his fingers could feel the loop of the pin.
He went back into the dining room. The table had been cleared. Leila was coming out of the kitchen with the cake her mother had made that day. It was iced, decorated, it would be sugary sweet, the cake he liked best. He kissed Wafiq, and the boy stared down at his table place; then he kissed Hani and the tears ran on the child’s cheeks; then his wife; then her mother and father.
He could tell them nothing.
All of them, the officers who went under orders to the al-Rashid camp, believed in the faint hope of survival, went with the hesitant innocence of lambs herded to the butcher’s knife, deluding themselves that the anxiety was unfounded.
He stood in the kitchen doorway, holding the sports bag, and faced them. Behind him was the hallway, the front door, the concrete pad where the car was parked, the shadows of the poorly lit street. If the anxiety was well founded, the agents of the Estikhabarat would already be in those shadows, watching his house. Sometimes the bodies were brought back, if their families paid a few dinars for the bullets that had been used.
He turned away from them, switched off the kitchen light, then went out through the back door. He slipped past the new building where her parents slept, and scrambled over the wall at the end of the yard.
He would spend one more night beside the water tank on the flat roof. And, if they were waiting for him, if they were there to take him, he would pull the pin from the RG-42 high-explosive fragmentation grenade. Major Karim Aziz knew of no other road he should follow.