‘I want you to look in here, John.’
Nalan stood back and pointed to the entrance to a cell. The steel door was open, but this cell was darker than the others – the only light that entered came from out in the corridor. It illuminated the life-sized model of a woman leaning against a concrete pillar. Her head was thrown back and her eyes were shut. A young girl, less than half her size, was clinging to her legs and looking down at the ground.
‘This is my mother. The young girl is me. I was five years old in March 1991 when they came to liberate Amna Suraka. I had been here since I was three.’
Hart couldn’t take his eyes from the two female figures. ‘This is you? This little girl?’
Nalan nodded. ‘This is my mother, yes. And this is me.’
‘So this is how you know this place? This is how you knew to bring us here?’
‘This is how I know this place. There were forty women and children imprisoned in this room. You see those blankets on the floor? The dog bowl over there to drink from? That is how they saw us. As dogs. The women left those behind when they were released by the Peshmerga following a two-day gun battle. You saw the bullet marks outside in the courtyard where we came in? The shell holes? Our soldiers found the rape rooms and the torture chambers and the isolation cells when they broke in. It sent them crazy. They killed 700 Ba’athists in this place. It was far too few. Guards. Torturers. Rapists. Spies. But not Hassif. No. That man managed to get away. Later, when the Allies eased off their air attack, Saddam came back. For a while it looked like he would get his revenge. That Hassif would return to torment us. But the no-fly zone was implemented. For the first time in a hundred years, the Kurds were free.’
‘And your mother?’
‘They raped her too many times. Humiliated her too many times. It was too much for her to bear. She and my father committed joint suicide in 1993. I was brought up by my uncle and aunt. They were very kind to me. I am very lucky.’
THREE
Hart glanced down at his watch. It had been two hours since they had heard the last of the hand grenades exploding against the outside door of the museum. For a while after that there had been silence in the streets. Now the gunfire was starting up again.
The young soldier stood up and walked across to where Hart was sitting. Wordlessly, he handed Hart his abbreviated AK47. He returned to his corner, sat down, and turned his head to the wall.
Hart hesitated, unsure what to do.
But Nalan knew.
She got to her feet and approached Hart. She opened her hands. He understood immediately. He handed her the AK47.
She walked across to where the young soldier was sitting and touched him on the shoulder. He turned to look at her. She held out the gun. He refused to take it. Nalan stood in front of him with the gun held out.
Finally he took it.
She cupped his face in her hands and looked into his eyes. She said something and he acknowledged it. She repeated it, and he acknowledged it a second time.
She went back to sit beside Hart.
‘What did you say to him?’
Nalan shrugged. ‘I asked him if he was a Kurd. I asked him if the men outside were his enemies.’
‘And what did he tell you?’
‘He said yes. He was a Kurd. And they were his enemies. Then I asked him again. But more forcefully this time. When he answered me the second time he was a man again.’
Hart shook his head. He was utterly bewildered by Nalan. Bewildered by his feelings for her. Bewildered by the fact that she could come back to this place after twenty-two years and confront her demons without cracking up. If he had gone through a fraction of what she and her parents had gone through, he would have wished the place blasted off the face of the planet. Razed. Its fields planted with salt like those of Carthage.
‘Who are they? The gunmen outside?’
‘They are Shiite. Paid by Iran. Or they are Sunni. Paid by Saudi Arabia. Take your pick. It amuses them to try and turn Kurdistan into a war zone. They are jealous of us. Jealous that we have security. Oil. The beginnings of an autonomous nation. They hate us. They want a civil war. But we shall not give it to them.’
‘Do such things happen often?’
‘No. Not nowadays. Not here. This is a bad thing. Very bad. They will try to do much damage. They know you are in the museum. They know by your cameras that you are a journalist. They will try to kidnap you. Or kill you. Either way you will be news to them. A triumph if they can get to you. A way to make the West listen to what they are saying.’
‘But you think we’re safe here? For the time being?’
Nalan looked at her watch. ‘For another hour. Maybe two. When night falls they will try again.’
‘Then we must escape.’
‘There is no way out of here but that door. They will be watching it. We must hope that it holds.’
‘And your soldiers?’
‘The entire area will be sealed off and surrounded. But the bombers will be well prepared. They have come here ready to die. They will have weapons. Food. Water. Suicide vests. They will have done their surveillance many times in the past months. They will know the area and its weak points. They have done this before. It is second nature to them. Our soldiers need to act quickly. If they do not, we are lost.’
‘I still think we must try to break out before the bombers come. There must be another way.’
Nalan looked at Hart, although her attention seemed elsewhere. ‘There is one way. Perhaps. But we must wait. We must use the darkness too.’
“How long before darkness starts falling?”
She glanced at her watch again.
‘Another hour.’
FOUR
Hart tried his phone again. Still no signal. He glanced up. Nalan was staring at him with a peculiar intensity.
‘You? Are you married?’ she said.
He was tempted to laugh at the abruptness of her question, but something in her expression stopped him. ‘No.’
‘Why not? You are an old man?’
Hart made a face. ‘No. I’m not an old man. I’m forty.’
Nalan burst out laughing. ‘Don’t look so serious. I was teasing you. In Kurdistan you are barely old enough to be a leader at forty. To be respected. We look at age differently here.’
‘That’s a relief.’
Nalan arched her head to one side and peered at him again. ‘Why are you not married? Why do you not have children? A man your age should have a family. A wife. Responsibilities. All you have are those cameras.’ She pointed to Hart’s chest. ‘Is that all you have? Those cameras?’
Hart looked at her in amazement. Nalan’s hair was the red gold of weathered bamboo. Her complexion was pale, her nose straight, her mouth a perfect crescent. Her eyes, which almost matched the colour of her hair, were set far apart in a broad, unlined face. She was a smallish woman, maybe five foot five inches tall, with delicate features and emphatic eyebrows. She wore six or seven bangles and bracelets on each arm, and on her nose, high up, just above her right nostril, a diamond chip glittered.
Nalan’s crowning glory was her hair, Hart decided, at the end of his unexpected re-evaluation. It framed a sharp-jawed, intelligent face, whose owner looked you unwaveringly in the eye. The red-gold ringlets reached all the way down to the small of Nalan’s back, and were swept away from her forehead to leave a small widow’s peak, akin to but less pronounced than his own. Around her neck she wore a simple green bead necklace. Her hands bore no rings, nor any sign of them. Hart found her presence mesmerizing, and he was finding it increasingly hard to hide his interest in her. ‘Yes, I suppose these cameras are all I have.’
‘But you like women? Not just your cameras?’
‘You already know I like women. That much must be obvious to you.’
Nalan gave him a secret smile. She crossed her arms. ‘So? Tell me. Tell me about all these women of yours.’
Hart sighed. Why were women – and especially beautiful women – al
ways so damned inquisitive? There were moments when he roundly cursed his susceptibility to their charms. ‘So. I had a long-standing girlfriend. The woman I spoke to on the phone before we entered here. But something happened and we aren’t together any more.’
‘What happened?’
Hart squirmed internally. All his life he had been wedded to truth as to a jealous lover. He could no more avoid answering Nalan’s question than he could abandon a wounded, car-struck animal on the side of the road. ‘She aborted our baby without telling me. That’s what happened.’
Nalan stared at him, her face livid with shock. ‘She aborted it?’
‘Yes. It’s what women do in the West when they don’t want children.’
‘Then she did not love you?’
Hart shook his head. ‘She did love me. I know that now. But she did not want our baby. She is a journalist. She had seen too much bloodshed. She refused to bring a baby into a world she did not care for.’
‘This I can understand. But you? You wanted this baby?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you left her?’
‘Eventually. Yes.’
‘Does it make you sad?’
‘No. Not any more.’
‘Does it make her sad?’
‘I believe it does. And I am sorry for that. But it’s not something I can help.’
They sat in silence for a while. Then Nalan cocked her head to one side in the particular way Hart had noted in her when she wanted to ask an indelicate question. ‘No one else?’
Hart rolled his eyes. ‘Yes. Last year in Germany. I was involved with a woman. An extremist politician. Not a good person.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘She was killed. She, too, was carrying my child.’
Nalan stared at Hart in horror. ‘I’m sorry.’
Hart tried to laugh, but it came out all wrong. It sounded more like a sob. ‘This is the moment you’re meant to say, “Maybe you’re just not cut out to be a father? Maybe you should lay off women and take up flying model aeroplanes instead?”’
‘That would be in poor taste.’
Hart bowed his head. ‘Yes, it would. I’m sorry I said it. My bitterness must be showing.’ He glanced down at his watch. Another twenty minutes to go before they must move. He needed to change the subject. ‘And you? Your fiancé? What about him?’ He did not want to know the answer. But it was the only remotely associated question he could think of on the spur of the moment. And it would be expected of him.
‘I’m a Chaldean Christian. We do not marry outside our faith. My uncle and aunt have chosen a husband for me, since I have shown no sign of choosing one for myself. They think it is time for me to stop work and have children. They are right.’
‘Do you like him at least?’
‘How can I like him? I do not know him. I am meeting him for the first time next week. Then we are getting married.’
Hart swallowed. ‘Do you mean to tell me that Chaldeans would honour-kill a woman who married outside her faith?’
Nalan looked shocked. ‘No. We are Christians. Only Muslims do that sort of thing.’
‘What would Christians do?’
‘My family would cast me out. I would be exiled from my community.’
‘That’s a lot more civilized.’
‘Yes. Yes, it is.’
Hart realized that Nalan had missed the heavy irony in his tone. He felt ashamed of himself for injecting it into his comment. As if he had betrayed her in some way. Abused her trust. ‘Are you at least allowed affairs?’
‘Affairs? You mean sex with strangers? Strangers like you?’
‘Well. No. Not me in particular. I meant love affairs.’
Nalan put on a serious face. ‘A Chaldean bride must go to the altar a virgin, or she will shame her family for ever.’
‘Ah.’ Hart sensed that Nalan was making fun of him. But he still couldn’t work out how truly accurate her answers were. Or whether they applied to her particular case or not. Maybe she was just fulfilling her function as his guide and trying to explain how the country worked to him? That’s what she was being paid to do, after all. From her point of view, the situation they found themselves in was a freak occurrence and had created an unwarranted intimacy. She was probably just making the best of a bad lot.
There was the crump of another hand grenade at the door to the cells.
Nalan looked pleased. ‘Good. They are trying to break in again. Come with me. We will take advantage of their activities.’ Nalan signalled to the young soldier and he, too, got up from the floor.
Hart nodded to him in a friendly fashion, but he felt uncomfortable at having been a witness to the boy’s vulnerability. There was an extra edge to the young man’s expression now – a new rigidity – which disturbed him.
They made their way down a sparsely lit corridor and up some stairs to what appeared to be a mezzanine.
‘These are the rape rooms.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘These are the rooms where Hassif and his warders raped the women prisoners. This one at the end here . . .’ Nalan pushed open the door. ‘This one I know very well.’ She walked inside.
Hart hesitated on the threshold. It was as though the invisible aura the room exuded was staying him in some way. He tried to fight back the question he felt driven to ask, but couldn’t. ‘Did they rape you, Nalan?’
Nalan shook her head. ‘I was five years old. They were not interested in me for sexual purposes. They took me in here and made me watch my mother being raped instead. My father they took in too. Hassif did this to complete my family’s humiliation. It was personal with him. Something my father had done to offend him in a former life. This is why they killed themselves, my mother and father. Because of the shame of what I had been forced to witness. Of what I had been forced to undergo because of them.’
Hart glanced at the young soldier behind him. Did he understand English? Did he understand what Nalan was saying? The horrors that had occurred here? The boy provided security for the museum. He must know what this place was. It would be in his blood, even though he had not been born at the time these things were happening. These outrages had been perpetrated on his own people, after all.
The young man’s face was blank, his thoughts seemingly elsewhere.
Nalan seemed to intuit what Hart had been thinking. ‘No one comes here. These rooms do not form part of the museum. They are used for storage now. What these rooms were used for before has been forgotten.’ She pointed upwards. ‘But I remember.’
Hart followed the direction of her hand. A trapdoor was set into the ceiling.
‘No. I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘You can’t have remembered the trapdoor. You were barely five years old when you left here. Scarcely old enough to remember anything.’
Nalan looked away so that he could not see the expression on her face. ‘I came back. Three years ago. I asked to see this place. There was another curator then. Not the man we saw die outside. A better man. He took me here. Left me to see for myself. I spent a day and a night in here. He was very kind. He brought me food. Blankets. Let me use the staff facilities. He did not allow anyone to disturb me.’ Nalan turned towards Hart. ‘When I left this room I had remembered everything.’ She managed a fleeting smile. ‘Even the trapdoor.’
Nalan’s smile was so unexpected that Hart could not find it in himself to respond. The room weighed him down with its accumulated memories. Diminished him. Tarnished him with its associated guilt. ‘Where do you think the trapdoor leads? If it’s just to a loft, we are no better off.’
‘I do not know where it leads. But it is our only chance to get out. It will be dark outside now. Soon they will break in through the door downstairs. They have nothing to lose. They think we will be hostages for them. That is why they are holding us for last. That is why they have not been pressing hard to get in to us.’
Hart sensed that she was right. As far as the men outside were concerned, the three of them
were boxed in and waiting. Like Christmas turkeys in a holding pen.
He signalled to the young soldier and they began constructing a makeshift ladder out of the packing cases and assorted junk that littered the room.
‘Okay,’ said Hart. ‘I’m by far the oldest person here. I get to go up first.’
FIVE
The loft space was even more cluttered than the room below. Its height was severely restricted because of the steep angle of the roof. At first, Hart couldn’t work out the architecture of the place. By rights the loft shouldn’t even have been there. The main building was constructed on the accordion principle – that much he’d seen before entering it. So what was this space? And what had been its function?
He crawled along the floor until he reached the end wall. Then he got to his knees and felt carefully around the roof space above him. The light from the room below radiated only part-way to where he was kneeling, so that he was in almost total darkness.
He touched what he assumed to be tiles. No lagging. No boards. As far as Hart could make out, the tiles were laid in grid formation directly onto the beams.
He crawled back the length of the loft space. He looked down at Nalan and the soldier. He lowered his voice to a whisper.
‘I’m pretty sure we can break through onto the roof. I think this whole section is an add-on to the original building. It’s built like an old-fashioned barn. The tiles are laid directly onto the beams and crossbars. Nailed on probably. One interleaved over the other so that they’re rainproof. The thing was built on the cheap, in other words.’
‘And it leads directly to the outside?’
‘There’s only one way to discover that. But we must do everything in the dark. A total blackout. This attic has to be on the same side of the building as the steel door. So if they’re watching that, and if they happen to look up, they’ll see us. So we need to switch off the light down here before we go up. And we need to knock down the makeshift ladder behind us and shut the trapdoor in case they manage to break in and come looking for us. It might buy us a couple of extra minutes. Because it won’t take them long to suss this place out once they break in. But it means committing ourselves entirely. No going back.’
The Templar Inheritance Page 2