The Corporal's Wife (2013) (43 page)

They were ‘shit’. They were ‘idiots’. They were a ‘disgrace’ to their uniforms. Did they not know that down the road two men from the
basij
had been martyred by the foreign bandits? Were their weapons cocked? Did they stop vehicles as they’d been instructed? No one sauntered into the road again. The two cars were checked. Zach came out of the field, his shoes squelching from the bog he had been through. He reckoned he had a few seconds before attention fell on him. He heard two grumble.

They were looking for several men, all British, and one Iranian woman.

The men and the woman would be inside a big orange Volkswagen van, of the sort used for mobile camping.

The two cars they stopped and checked had no common point: an old man and an old woman in the first; a young man, intelligent, well dressed, in the second. They were allowed to go forward after their papers had been examined, the boot of each car lifted and the bonnets. The grumble continued and a motorcycle came close. The rider was yelled at. One motorcycle, one rider, no passenger. Zach crossed the road. A lorry came fast, going south, and the driver ignored the half-hearted gesture for him to slow. It was a big lorry, pulling a trailer, and threw up spray. Zach was surprised that he had, still, evaded attention. He was remembering why so many motorcycles in Iran were underpowered. The tutor at the School had told them that high-performance bikes were used for assassinations in the early days after the revolution by the Communist resistance to the Ayatollah: leading clerics were targets, the judges who passed down the most death sentences and the torturers of the new VEVAK agency. Big bikes came up behind them and they were shot from the pillion by a marksman or had bombs with magnets clamped onto their car roofs, and the bike was away at speed. Nobody in modern Iran was allowed a motorcycle beyond the limited power of 125cc. Gunfire crashed in his ears.

The sergeant stood, legs braced, in the centre of the parking area beyond the pumps and had his weapon jammed at his shoulder. The spent cases tinkled on the concrete. The lorry’s brakes and tyres screamed. Zach saw it lurch across the road. The cab swerved and the trailer went ahead. There was the smell of burning rubber. The moment came when the cab might have toppled and the trailer have gone over on its side. Other soldiers crouched in the firing position. The young man in the Audi was out of his seat, left his door open and his engine turning. He lay on his stomach in the road. So did the two old people, the woman covering her husband. There was the stink of the cordite.

A man came down from the cab, about a hundred yards up the road from where the sergeant stood. He came forward, blood running from his forehead. Zach thought it would have smacked the side window. More blood dripped from his nose. He was not intimidated and yelled abuse.

Zach moved. A God-given opportunity . . .

He came past the old couple – the woman in her black
chador
was wriggling off the man and her veil had slipped, which meant modesty was on a back burner. The old man’s denture plate had come loose and was half out of his mouth. Zach slipped past the young man. It was a God-given opportunity, and would hardly be repeated. Every man in uniform was watching the lorry driver with one eye and the sergeant with the other.

The shouting was at fever pitch. A lorry driver with his face dented and a sergeant in the Guards Corps, who believed that insufficient respect had been shown him. Zach had little time to play with because his watch showed an hour had been used up.

He went past the café. The customers were cowering on the floor and the owner was by a back wall. There was the door for the toilets and a man huddled there, but Zach shrugged at him and gave no explanation of the gunfire. He went into the repair shed where he found two men. They had a radio turned up loud and there was the throb of a generator, the whine of an acetylene cutter and a welder. Zach – on the hoof – gave his explanation.

‘There’s a complete fool out there, a sergeant who thinks he’s a general. They have a road block for foreign terrorists, and a lorry goes by with a load of furniture or pistachios or luxuries for those bastards in Tehran and it doesn’t slow down. The driver has a schedule so he doesn’t stop. The sergeant believes that was disrespectful to his high rank – a sergeant! – and starts shooting. Now the lorry’s blocking the road and the driver’s hurt. Soon they’ll be fighting. I have a problem.’

The radio was turned off, the cutter unplugged, the welder shut down. They could hear the abuse yelled from the road. They were starting to shift and wanted a front-row view.

Zach had his wallet out. ‘I can do it with dollars. My wife’s in the car. She’s pregnant, very heavy – maybe a week, two weeks to go. I could burn in Hell for this – I didn’t fill the tank and we’re out. We’re going to the hospital in Khvoy for a check-up, I hope routine. She lost one – six months, born dead. Please, a can for the fuel. And will you fill it? I don’t want to be at the front with those idiots. Please, it’s for my wife. Just ten litres. We’re not from these parts but from the south. Heaven bless your kindness.’

Two ten-dollar bills were taken from his hand. He did the shrug, helpless, of a man who had cried for help and expressed sincere gratitude. The price of an old jerry-can and ten litres would be half of what he had given them. He palmed another ten-dollar bill, which was taken.

Zach said to their backs, ‘The man’s a lunatic. I’ll be here for an hour if he sees me at the pumps and my wife’s appointment is . . .’

He waited. He came out of the workshop, rounded the corner of the building and stood by the toilet door. The sergeant and the lorry driver were toe to toe. They were screaming into each other’s faces. The audience grew. A mechanic was at the nearest pump and had the nozzle in the can. The lorry driver shuffled, heavy-footed, readied himself and swung. The rifle was coming up, and two men, one uniformed, one in the kit of the garage company, inserted themselves. There was a scrum.

Zach ran. The mechanic still had the nozzle in the can, but Zach snatched the handle, slapped down the clasp and was gone. A last look at the fight: every eye on it, none on him. A last glance at the watch on his wrist – taunting before, now mocking – and he went over the road and started across the sodden grass. Murphy’s law – fucking Murphy. He was well into the first field and the nearest goats were watching him. He thought he could see the wagon in the mist, far away, and the shout echoed.

Who was he? He should stop. He
must
stop.

Zach imagined a rifle raised to a shoulder and thought he heard the rasp of it being armed. He seemed to feel the mark on his back where the view through the sight latched. He did what a lorry driver might have done, one doing heavy haulage in north-west Iran or in the south-west Midlands of his own country. He kept his back to the garage and wondered if the fight had finished. He raised his free hand and did the one-finger salute. He kept going, neither faster nor slower.

No shot was fired.

He carried the fuel and the herd parted for him. The kids’ dogs came close, yapping, but stayed clear of his ankles. He went as fast as he was able.

A boy brought their coffee. It was always late in the morning when he came and they had worked enough hours to need the break. Their throats would be dry with the stink of old engine oil and from the fumes when they ran the engines they had repaired. With the rain, the pollution pressed down and was trapped in the yard.

The two old friends revelled in the names they had acquired – Highness and Excellency – and would take the opportunity to sit and glance at the newspaper. The boy always brought the paper too. The rule of the mullahs was conservative and the paper reflected their views, but both men thought it sensible to read those opinions, be able to repeat them verbatim and survive. The order book was nearly full and they worked every hour they could because it was a diversion and their nagging worries could be pushed back if they toiled on the benches. They put in long hours . . . and missed her already. She had been like a candle that illuminated their lives. Now only a dim bulb was left.

They had their coffee. They shared the paper. Highness had the news section and Excellency had the supplement with the teasers and puzzles.

The breath whistled in Highness’s mouth. He reached a hand behind his head and scratched hard at the skin where he had long before gone bald. He passed the page. So clear. A big photograph of a body, its upper torso and shoulders covered, a small photo of an ID card and a name. A good likeness. Johnny had been theirs. To them Johnny had been a god, and the day he had died had been one when age had seemed to catch them and make a mockery of any serenity they had felt in recent years. Johnny had brought her here and – from afar and with correctness – they had loved her. The captain had invited himself, had swept aside her reserve, had made them both laugh and smile, and had treated her with a tender love that might have been temporary but might have lasted. It had hurt when his death in combat was reported. The intelligence officer, infatuated, had tracked her to the yard, had insinuated himself into her life. How was it possible to send such a man away? Gone now. Never liked, never wanted.

The paper the boy had brought the day before had carried a story of a shooting at a road block on the main trunk road to the north-west, the borders; two men had died there. They knew how far she had gone, and thought they would have heard if she had been taken. Both men had prayed the quiet words used by random believers. Excellency held the paper closer to his face, then unhooked his spectacles and used them to magnify a whitish speck on the stones, near to the rail, between two sleepers and close to the hand that protruded from the covering.

‘Even he had it.’

‘Even him.’

‘You remember their laughter when she gave the picture to Johnny, no face shown.’

‘Her eyes were clear – wonderful eyes.’

‘And the soldier had the picture. You remember he told her – and us – that the picture of her, all black but for the eyes, would be with him, against his chest, all the time he was at war.’

‘A sniper shot him. This man had her picture too.’

‘And is dead. Three pictures, three men. To take a picture from her is to be dead.’

‘The guards, they were cowboys, but the boy with the Farsi was outstanding – you said from the south and I said from the south-east. Anyway, as good as a native. He persuaded her. Will he be rewarded?’

‘She is so beautiful.’

‘The most beautiful.’

‘Will he be rewarded as they were, given a photograph? Will it kill him? Is he condemned if she gives him the photograph?’

Excellency crumpled the page of the paper and threw it accurately into the bin near the door. He swigged the rest of his coffee and tossed the cardboard beaker after the newspaper. He went back to his bench, then snarled. ‘It was too easy to love her.’

‘You’ve not done this before.’ Not a question, an accusation, intended to belittle.

‘No,’ Sidney answered.

‘It’s what I do. I’m a babysitter,’ Father William pressed.

‘Don’t mind me,’ Sidney said, ‘but I’d call that an empty life.’

‘And I share that opinion with Auntie and Nobby. We’re as one.’

‘Lives without purpose. I weep for you. And don’t forget I’m on this team because Petroc wanted me. He was given you, with all your skills and expertise, but he wanted me – needed me.’

‘So, where do you feel your understanding comes from?’ Father William held a mug of coffee and his hand shook, stopping it. It was in the nature of the work that confrontations were used only to serve a purpose: without meaning, they were valueless. He had been pushed forward. Auntie wasn’t a fighter and always backed away from verbal confrontation, and Nobby was a coaster. Petroc Kenning had done the questioning; there had been a light reference between him and the corporal about a castle visit. Auntie did not think a loosening of the leash appropriate, and Nobby rated it premature; Father William had claimed insight and called the Iranian ‘as slippery as a bloody frog’.

Sidney had won Petroc’s support. It wasn’t for them to argue. Father William couldn’t have put his finger on the reason for his concern, but it nagged. He had lost, and out in the corridor he had snapped at Sidney – insufferable, a chancer, and one of those who, as his dad would have said, ‘sails too close to the wind’. He repeated: ‘What’s the spring from which your God-given insight flows?’

‘Just life’s rich tapestry. Having a nose for people, finding out how they tick. It’s an art form. Try it.’

The previous afternoon had been an emotional journey for all of them. The long drive to Judenburg, the story he had told, the new bridge in place where the old iron one had been, the tumbling weir water and the swirl in the big pool below it. They would all have had little difficulty in summoning the images of young soldiers with fixed bayonets or wooden clubs as they forced the men, women and children across the bridge into the arms of the Red Army. They could picture the men who had held their children to their chests, clutched a wife’s hand, sprawled over the side of the bridge and plummeted down. They could watch the soldiers, in khaki, working the banks of the river and shooting those trying to escape.
His
reaction had been strange: he had listened, said little on the drive home, had sat down in the evening, worked with them, done what had been asked of him, and again that morning had seemed to co-operate, as if his commitment was resurrected. Father William’s wife might have read it better than he did, because she had more education and claimed better nous. He shrugged. ‘So be it.’