Hudd asked, ‘What did you bring?’
‘Eggs and slices of lamb salted and smoked. Not unlike your bacon. I miss bacon. I was at Cambridge University. We had bacon for breakfast every morning. Here it is mainly grains.’
‘Why don’t you get down,’ I asked him. ‘We can talk.’
‘We brought fresh water as well,’ he said. ‘They make wonderful tea.’
‘My name is Charlie Bassett,’ I told him. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Şivan Mohamed Van,’ he came back. ‘I’ll explain that later.’ I realized that I actually didn’t know Hudd’s Christian name, so I left it to him.
Hudd just said, ‘Hiya,’ and ostentatiously put the gun down. It was funny how you felt the tension go out of the scene immediately.
Van’s men made two decent fires, and gathered around one of them scoffing something that looked like blue porridge and quarrelling good-naturedly. They were young and a boisterous bunch, who laughed a lot. Most of the jokes were on us, I guessed. They were small men – I would have fitted in here – but the guns, swords and lances they were carrying definitely made them look bigger. I didn’t look too closely, but I reckoned that a couple of the lances were adorned with hanks of human hair. Bloody scalp hunters!
One of them fussed around Van, and also made our breakfast. It started with the tea, and Van had been right; it was exquisite.
‘When were you at Cambridge?’ I asked him.
‘Immediately after the war. Your university needed the money, and Pater was ready to pay.’
‘What did you study?’
‘Absolutely nothing, old boy. I sowed my wild oats: girls, alcohol and as many other un-Islamic things as I could find. Three years later I came back to take my place in the family. Here I am a pious and responsible man – with three wives.’
I reckoned he’d done all right for himself, and asked, ‘You didn’t get a degree then?’
‘Of course I did, old boy: Classics and Mid-Eastern Studies: First-Class Honours. My father always gets what he pays for – it is a matter of principle.’
‘I suppose it is, really. Nice tea.’
‘Thank you. Did you go to university also?’
‘No, my family could never have afforded it.’
‘Don’t forget to tell him you were too thick, as well,’ Hudd offered.
‘That too,’ I said. ‘Life’s unfair.’ But I was grinning.
‘That’s exactly what I thought when I saw your fire. After all this time I had hoped that we might keep it.’ He was talking about the money again.
I said, ‘We’ve come to negotiate about that.’
Van shook his head. ‘When you’re British and you own something, you don’t negotiate over it. You reach out your hand and take it back.’
Hudd nodded gravely, and observed, ‘It’s a matter of principle,’ as if he had just invented the phrase. I glanced over at Van’s army whooping it up at the other fire. Easier said than done, I thought.
The eggs were small and gamy-tasting, but to me they tasted wonderful. Van’s man had scrambled them in a kind of curd. Terrific. Kurds with curds; that’s not bad, Charlie. We finished off with another cup of scented tea.
‘It’s from Iraq,’ he told us. ‘That part of Iraq was once part of Kurdistan. One day it will be again.’
‘Who took it away from you?’ I asked. I get all the dumb questions – that’s my role in life.
‘The British did. You aren’t all that popular around here.’
‘I heard that your people never surrendered.’
‘That’s not surprising, Charlie. There is no word for it in our language; we can’t surrender because we do not know what a surrender is.’
‘Which could make you a difficult neighbour to get on with?’
‘. . . or the very best of allies. Your choice.’
I didn’t even give Hudd a chance. I said, ‘We want to be your friends.’
‘Good choice,’ Van said. He muttered something to his man who was cleaning the utensils with dirt – interesting, but just work it out. He went across to speak with the others. Seconds later they surprised me by beginning to shout and jig about, and fire their guns in the air.
‘Well done, Charlie,’ Hudd groused. ‘I think you just started an uprising.’
Van touched me on the shoulder, ‘Don’t worry . . . but before you pack you must tell me why you buried the Jew.’
The man in the turret had been one of an Israeli party sent out to recover Frohlich’s cargo several years earlier. The implication of that was that at least one of Frohlich’s crew had made it all the way to the Promised Land. The Israeli in the turret had been bitten by a snake, and abandoned by his mates. At the time I thought that was a very Israeli way of looking at things: they’ve changed since then. He’d shut himself in the turret when Van and his people had turned up, and threatened them all with a pistol.
‘It was very sad,’ Van told us. ‘We could probably have saved him. There are several useful antidotes. All you have to do is chew one of the grasses, and spit it inside the wounds.’
‘How did you finish him?’ Hudd: being awkward again.
‘We didn’t. The snake already had. We watched him until he was dead, and then left him there. He seemed to be where he wanted to be.’
‘How many were there in his party?’
‘Fifteen. They were heavily armed.’
‘Did you finish them too?’
‘No: who wants to make an enemy of Israel? Any people unafraid of blowing up a hotel full of British soldiers are not going to stop for a few Kurds. My father knew what to do. He believed that Israel will dig its own grave if we give it a big enough shovel.’
‘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 and a sister, but they are both dead.’
‘Does that make you sad?’
‘So sad that I try not to remember it. My father is still alive, but recently he has begun to oppose our government in the matter of foreign wars, and has been arrested several times. He might even be in prison now.’ I paused to wonder why I had told this stranger so much about myself already.
He smiled, and passed the hookah back to me.
‘. . . it is because you look at me, and think This man is like me.’
‘How did you know what I was thinking?’
‘Because I am like you. It might also be something to do with the native tobacco we are sharing: it has beneficial effects, it is said.’ I should have paid more attention to that.
He then asked, ‘Are you married?’
‘I have two children, boys, but I haven’t married yet.’
Şiwan laughed. He had a wealthy laugh; one that said that life amused him. ‘Isn’t that rather putting the cart before the horse, old boy?’ I now found that rather funny as well, and also laughed aloud. I couldn’t remember the last time I had laughed like that.
I know that by now you’re worrying about Hudd. Well, don’t. He was in a small windowless room off the one I was sitting in: counting the money, of course.
I found him later in the small room we had been allocated to sleep in. There were two small horsehair mattresses on pallet beds, and heaps of heavy blankets. Homely and clean. I knew that I wouldn’t wake up scratching.
Hudd sniffed as soon as he looked at me, and said, ‘Christ, Charlie; you haven’t been smoking that stuff, have you? It will rot your brain, and make you sterile.’
‘What stuff?’ Then I understood. ‘Oh, is that what it was? I’ve seen those Air Ministry films as well, and don’t believe a word of them. I just feel a bit light-headed, that’s all . . . and very relaxed. I’m sure I haven’t gone sterile yet.’ I was just justifying myself, of course, which was stupid. I should have realized what I was doing.
‘What did you tell him?’
‘Apart from name, rank and serial number? We talked about our fathers. His died last year, and he’s still upset about it. Have we found Watson’s money?’
Hudd sighed, ‘Yes and no. The three boxes they keep in the small room have the gold coin. There’s fifty or sixty coins missing, but that doesn’t amount to much.’
‘So we’ve found the money Watson said we could keep. I like you, Hudd; you never take your eye off the ball.’
‘Stop messing about. We still don’t know where the paper stuff is, and that’s what’s important.’
‘Do you think Şiwan knows where it is?’
‘I don’t know. He acts as if he’s given me all of the money, apart from the odd coin . . . and do you know what they’ve done with them by the way?’
‘No.’ I yawned; ‘. . . and you’d better hurry up and tell me; I’m just about out on my feet.’
‘That’s the dope you smoked, you dope. I think all of the missing coins have been handed out, and made into decorations. Each of his wives has two around her neck on pieces of electrical wire. He wanted to collect them all back for us, but I told him no. They should keep them. Do you know why he’s helping us, when he’s already run rings around the Frogs and the Israelis?’
‘Something to do with a sense of honour I think. His father told him that the rightful owner would come looking for it one day, and it would cause problems for the family if they didn’t hand it over. Apparently the old man said they’d had enough trouble with the British Empire already, without taking it on again. You’ll find the words rightful and owner are very big out here. The Vans own about a thousand square miles of mountain, and would fight to retain every stone of it. It also helps that he was educated in Cambridge, and has fond memories of its women.’
‘I’ve never been to Cambridge.’
‘I have. I’ll lie down now, and tell you about it. When I stop speaking you’ll know I’m asleep.’
The next morning Hudd told me those were the last words I spoke that night.
After breakfast of yoghurt, cheeses and flat bread, I explained to Van, ‘I need to radio my boss, and tell him our situation . . . but I don’t want to do it behind your back, and make you suspicious. You can listen in if you like.’
I had waited for Hudd to go out for his morning stroll. He did that after his morning meal; usually with a small spade in his hand – and by the way, spade means shovel, not a suit in a card game.
Şiwan said, ‘He can hear you from here?’
‘Morse code only. We can throw a signal hundreds of miles these days with the right equipment.’
‘I can’t read Morse.’
‘You’ll have to take me on trust then. Though some say it’s difficult to trust someone from Stoke-on-Trent.’ I enjoyed that. Touché.
I sent, Recovered coin with local help. Still trying.
You’re always trying, was what came back at me. Don’t know why we put up with you. I didn’t recognize the hand, but the opening challenge and responses had been OK so I guesse
d it was M’smith. Wrong again. If my head felt muzzy that morning I had only myself to blame.
Hector?
Daisy.
You take a great photograph. Tell the boss we’ll check in again later.
Why did you do that? I asked myself as I stowed the aerial. Why do you always have to be a smart arse?
Van asked, ‘What’s the matter? Bad news?’ There must have been something in my face.
‘No. I just made a Smart-Alec comment which will probably hurt someone, and get me into trouble. Why do we do that sort of thing?’
‘Usually because we can’t resist it. I can’t speak for you, old boy, but when I do it I suspect that it’s at times when I lack confidence. My old tutor used to talk about the Spartans getting their retaliation in first. It’s one of those phrases that make no sense, but actually make perfect sense. What do you think?’
I thought for a moment, and then said, ‘I think your father left his family in very safe hands.’ That seemed to please him. So I took a chance, and asked, ‘What else did you find in the plane?’
His face fell. ‘Ah; so you want that as well. I’m sorry, I should have mentioned it. They are up on the roof. Why don’t you come with me?’
I followed him up an outside staircase. Hudd was just coming back; I risked a quick thumbs up to him as I passed. There were a couple of small servants’ rooms on the flat roof. I wondered if the eunuch lived there. Alongside them a brown skin awning had been rigged, beneath which were two seats from the Stirling each fitted into a wooden frame . . . and its radios and batteries.
‘Just my little vanity,’ he explained. ‘Sometimes I listen to music with one of the wives. I heard some of the London Olympics, relayed from Cyprus, and, last year, a Test match. I get a signal when the weather is clear. I will have them brought down.’
I laughed. When I stopped I said, ‘No. They’re yours. Consider them part payment from my government in recompense for the mayhem we’ve caused here.’
‘Thank you, Charlie, but that is also interesting.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it means, I think, that you are looking for something else which has been taken.’
Silent War Page 39