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 for the crime of proclaiming the First Republic of Kurdistan. I have good recall, I remember what I’ve read. A Foreign Office man wrote, in bloody Whitehall, about their freedom: “Their mode of life is primitive.
They are illiterate, untutored, resentful of authority and lacking in any sense of discipline.
The United Kingdom should not offer encouragement to the sterile idea of Kurdish independence.” We used to talk about freedom.
‘I went back to Lyneham, then to Germany, then was retired. I wrote two letters a year to him till 1979, and had two letters back, then I went out there again to see him. It was pretty hard to get the visa, but the British Museum was helpful. It had all changed…
That damned man had taken power. There were soldiers everywhere. I sensed the subjugation of the people. There was a French team digging at Nimrud, and we helped them. It wasn’t the same, there was an atmosphere of hate and fear. We continued to exchange letters. I was growing older and visas were exceptionally difficult to come by during the Iraq-Iran war, nigh on impossible, then there was the Gulf War, and the weasel messages sent by the Americans for the Kurds to rise up against the dictator. They did, the promised help never came, they fled.
‘I thought of Hoyshar and his family, refugees in the mountains. I found the comfort of my twilight life obscene. My son wouldn’t accompany me, said he was too busy with work. My grandson came with me. I heard his mother, my daughter-in-law, tell Gus before we set off, “Watch him, he’s a complete lunatic where these wretched Kurds are concerned. Don’t let him make a fool of himself.” I’d have gone anyway, he didn’t have to be with me. We were the original odd couple, me at seventy and him a full fifty years younger. They have a saying, “The Kurds have no friends but the mountains.” That’s where we found them, in their mountains, in the snow. It was incredible, a little piece of fate, that amongst a hundred thousand people we found them. His son had just buried two of Hoyshar’s grandchildren. All they had tried to do was to take what is natural to us, their freedom.’
Willet looked up from the page. He had filled all the space under the heading of MOTIVATION. There was a feeble sunlight on the window behind the old man, but he could see the bright boldness of the flowers on the lawns.
‘When did the letter come?’ Ms Manning asked briskly.
‘A month ago… That day on the mountains Gus met my friend and my friend’s family, and he met Meda, who was then a teenager. When the letter came last month, it was about freedom for a far-away people. Do you think, my dear, I’ve deserved a coffee break?’
She made the coffee while Willet carried the plate, cup, glass and the cutlery from the table and washed them up. The captain’s eyes were drawn to a curled photograph stuck with adhesive tape to a kitchen unit. On the slope of a hill, a thousand blurred faces behind them, a grizzle-faced man sat on a rock with a girl behind him, her hands on his shoulders. Defiance blazed from her eyes, which were compelling and erotic in their power.