The Second Saladin (11 page)

Chardy read:

I did not have a great deal of time to feel grief over the sudden disappearance of Paul, because almost immediately our bad situation became much worse: we came under shell attack. In my seven months with Ulu Beg and his group we had never been fired upon. I had seen bombed-out villages, of course, but I had no experience to prepare me for the fury of a modern high-explosive barrage. There was no way to take cover and, really, no cover. Ulu Beg had made his camp in a high, flat place under a ridge. The black tents were lined up under the mouth of a cave. The explosions were so incredibly loud and came so quickly that in the first seconds I became totally disoriented. A few people made it to the cave but most of us fell to the earth. I have never been so scared. In the few seconds between the blasts I would look around and try to squirm into a safer position but it was very difficult because there was so much smoke and dust in the air.

I thought the shelling lasted for hours. When it let up I felt dizzy and disoriented. Additionally, I had breathed a lot of smoke. I could not stop trembling, and though I had seen many wounded men in my times in the mountains, nothing could prepare me for the shock
of a firsthand view of what a high-powered shell can do to the human body. They could destroy it utterly.

I struggled to get some grip on myself, but even before the dust had settled Ulu Beg was running about. I had never seen him so desperate, yelling at people to move.

We ran chaotically through the dust. We ran up the sides of the hill and found a path along a ridge and ran along it, all of us, soldiers, their wives, all their children. I can still see that sight: over 100 men, women and children fleeing in abject panic. It looked like a scene from the beginning of World War II when the Germans bombed refugee columns in Poland. The women’s dresses and scarves stood out gaudily in the clouds of dust and I could see the turbans of the men, and their khaki pantaloons billowing over their boots. Most pathetic, along that lonely track, were the children, several of whom had been separated from their parents (if indeed their parents had not been killed in the shelling).

That night we hid in caves but were afraid even to light fires. We tried the radio, using the special channel as Chardy had instructed. But there was nothing. I even tried, thinking my English might be recognized by listeners back in Rezā’iyeh, but there was nothing at all. We felt alone in the world. I looked at the mountains in new fright. They had been so beautiful to me once, and now they scared me. If the Iraqis closed in we could hardly defend ourselves. If snow came and sealed us in a pass, we would certainly starve, for we had no food except what we could carry. And several people were badly hurt, including the wife of Amir Tawfiq, the man who commanded after Ulu Beg.

We saw Iraqis the next morning but they were far beneath us. Still, Ulu Beg believed it to be a large formation
in pursuit of us. He said it would take them hours to reach us, but by that time we’d be gone.

“Gone to where?” asked Amir Tawfiq.

“To the border,” Ulu Beg said. He said the Shah would give us safety.

Amir Tawfiq spat into the dust. The cartridges on his chest rattled. He was about 25. Amir Tawfiq said that the Shah was a black pig who suckled jackals. Ulu Beg told him we had no choice, and that was the end of the discussion.

We marched through the mountains for four days. Twice more we were shelled. The first shelling was the worst and three of the group were killed and several more wounded. They screamed to go along with us. But we had no choice. We had to push ahead.

My memories are quite indistinct. At one time Russian jets seemed to hunt us. We crouched in a long ravine and hid behind rocks—over a hundred people. We could see the shadow of the airplane passing over the ground and hear its roar, but could not see it because the sun was so bright. Apo, Ulu Beg’s oldest boy, hid with me.

The nights were very cold. We huddled together in caves or ravines and were still afraid to light fires. It was at these moments I felt the most alone. I wasn’t really a Kurd. I was an American, a foolish one, caught where she had no business to be. I didn’t think we really had a chance. We were on foot, running out of food and energy. There were no donkeys. We had come a terrible distance, we had a terrible distance to go and we were being pursued by men in machines who wanted to kill us.

I heard some men talking. They said we were doomed. It was all over. We’d never get out. Ulu Beg
said no. He said we had friends. Jardi’s friends. Jardi’s friends would help us.

We were almost there. I asked Ulu Beg how much farther? He pointed to a gap just ahead between mountains.

Ulu Beg asked me to come with him to talk to the Iranians.

We went down the trail and over the dusty rock, the two of us. The trail began to rise to the pass and we climbed between the forbidding cliffs. I fought to keep up. I wondered how the children would make this last, hardest part of the climb.

We were so close! The nightmare would soon be over! But I was also terrified that something would happen, so late, so close to survival.

We came over the crest. The land here was scorched. Nothing grew. For miles and miles it looked dead. There was no vegetation, no anything. It was the defoliated zone where the Iraqis had poured chemical poisons on the earth to prevent border crossings and resupply from Iran. I looked and could see where a stream had been cemented over.

We went ahead. If a Russian plane or helicopter came and caught us in the open, we’d be killed. Still, we didn’t have the luxury of waiting for nightfall. We picked our way through this wasteland until at last, several hours later, I could see the wire fence and the border station—and green plants again. The station was a low cinderblock building, with the Shah’s flag billowing on a pole near it. There were several military vehicles parked there too.

We raced to the gate. They had seen us coming and were ready. The officer in charge was a young major of very stiff and correct bearing. His name was Major
Mejhati—he wore it proudly on a tag on the chest of his battle tunic. His uniform was heavily starched.

He asked me in Farsi if I was an American. I said yes. He thought I looked American, even though I was dressed like a Kurd. He had been in America for a year and knew what American women looked like.

I explained to him that 100 people would be coming shortly, that some were wounded, some were children and all were hungry and exhausted. They were being pursued by Iraqis in Russian tanks, I told him.

He asked me what part of America I was from. I don’t know why he asked that. Anyway I told him.

He considered Boston a lovely town. He told me that he’d been to some Army college in Kansas. He told me he really liked America, America was a very great country and that he wished Iran was more like America.

I was afraid we’d be there for hours. Iranians love to talk and move slowly. They hate to be confronted with an actual reality.

Then he asked if these Kurds were of the Pesh Merga, the mountain fighters making a war against the Iraqis. I said yes. He said they could admit no Kurds. It was a new policy. He said he would be glad to have me come into his country but it was a new policy and the border was now closed to the Pesh Merga.

I wasn’t sure I’d understood him. I thought I’d misheard. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. I tried to get my composure back.

“There’s an arrangement,” I said. “Between the governments. Between my government and your government and the Pesh Merga.”

“There is no arrangement,” he said. Several of his officers and soldiers had their guns out and came over to us. They looked at us rudely.

I pointed to Ulu Beg. I remember that I said, “This man is famous. This is the famous Ulu Beg. He is a high officer in the Pesh Merga.”

Major Mejhati said the American lady was free to come into his country but that the Kurd was not. He said he’d have his men shoot if the Kurd didn’t move away from the border.

I told him there had been an American officer with us, an important man, with high connections in Tehran ….

But they told us that all the Americans were gone.

Ulu Beg turned and began to walk back to his people.

I ran after him.

We ran all that day and most of the next. We headed north, farther into the mountains. Our new goal was Turkey, where the border was not heavily guarded. It was a bitter solution to our problem, since the Kurds—and most of the Middle East—hate nothing more than the Turks, who for centuries, in their Ottoman Empire, ruled in corrupt greed.

The plan was then to continue north, into Russia. I knew that in his mind Ulu Beg was retracing the journey of Mullah Mustafa Barzani, who fled Iran after the collapse of the Kurdish republic at Mahābād in 1947. Barzani had gone into exile for 11 years in the Soviet Union. The irony of fleeing the Iraqis—who were led and supplied by the Russians—for Turkey and then
Russia, did not strike me at the time. Now it seems to illustrate to me a basic principle of Middle Eastern history and politics: ideology means nothing.

Finally, it was the sixth day, in the morning. We had found some caves and at last dared light a fire. We had even found a spring that was not cemented over.

Somebody turned on the radio—it was a standard procedure, for Jardi, as the Kurds called him, had always tried to make his contact with Rezā’iyeh in the morning—and suddenly, where for five days there had been nothing, there was a signal.

There was, as I understand, a certain code sequence to be gotten through before communications commenced. I heard Ulu Beg speaking in his awkward English.

“Fred to Tom,” he was saying. “Fred to Tom.”

The radio, a Russian thing like all the equipment Paul had brought, hissed and crackled.

I heard English words—“Tom to Fred, Tom to Fred”—and recognized the voice. It was Paul Chardy’s.

We waited in the clearing. The helicopters would come at four, Paul Chardy had said. There would be six of them, and they’d have to make two or three sorties to get everybody out. It had to be orderly, he said, no panic, no crowding, and it would take some time but they’d get everybody out.

The men were praising Allah the Merciful for their
deliverance but Ulu Beg said to praise Jardi and his friends from America.

We seemed to wait a year. It was really only a few hours. By now the skies had cleared and the sun was very hot. On higher peaks snowcaps reflected back at us. A few scrub oaks stood about in the clearing.

The people gathered in these few trees and I could see them laughing and lounging about, the bright colors of their clothes showing through the brown branches.

I had gone with Ulu Beg to a ridge above the clearing where we took some cover behind a group of rocks. I asked him if he was expecting trouble.

“I always expect trouble,” he said.

His face was caked with dust. The lips were cracked and almost white, his eyes a tired blue. He had taken his turban off and I was struck by his hair, which was almost a brownish blond. He had very powerful eyes.

He told me to go down below to wait for the helicopters.

“I will stay,” I said.

We heard the helicopters before we saw them. They rose over the crest of the hill. It was an extraordinary sight for me. I stared at them in almost dumb disbelief.

There were, as Paul had promised six of them. They hovered in the sky. On the ground, Amir Tawfiq ignited a green smoke bomb. A pillar of green rose through the trees.

The helicopters were gray things, and had the bull’s-eye Royal Iranian insignia on them. Their noses glittered in the sun because of all the glass or plastic. They were much bigger than I’d imagined. They generated a great deal of noise. They were in a formation of two lines, three each. They lowered themselves from the
sky, dark and big. I could see the pilots in helmets and sunglasses behind the windshields.

Their rotors pulled up the dust, which spun and whirled. It rose and stung my eyes. Green smoke whipped through the air. Wind beat against us and I could see the leaves of the trees shaking off.

I could see the two little boys, Apo and Memed, sitting off to one side. I could see Amir Tawfiq and his wife, whose arm was heavily bandaged. I could see Kak Farzanda, the old man, waiting patiently. I could see Haji Ishmail, who had been a porter in Baghdad before leaving to join the fight in the mountains. I could see Sulheya, the old woman, in her black scarf, who had told me stories and myths that I had recorded, and her daughter Nasreen, who did the cooking. I could see … well, I could see them all, people I’d lived with for seven months and grown, as much as is possible for a foreigner, a foreign woman even, to love.

The helicopters hung over the trees and for a while I did not quite understand what was happening. I stood, quite stupidly. There was a commotion in the dust down below.

Ulu Beg had turned and I heard him say, “Russians.”

Men in the helicopter doorways were shooting into the trees. Dust flew. I could see tree branches breaking. Links of color began to spit from the guns the men were shooting. It was as if they were hosing the trees with light. Sparks flew and fires started.

Beside me, Ulu Beg fired with his Russian gun. I could see a helicopter tilt as the glass of the windshield broke.
Kill them
, I felt myself thinking. The machine began to fall, tilting crazily. It broke up when it hit. Its blade thrashed at the earth. It exploded into a huge oily
wave of flame which spilled through the clearing. I was knocked back.

The men in the helicopters were shooting at us. Bullets were hitting rocks and banging off. The stench of burning gasoline reached my nose. I was so mixed up I almost walked into the terrible panorama beneath us, but Ulu Beg grabbed my arm and pulled me down the far side of the ridge to a dark ravine. We tumbled down its side, sliding through the rocks. In my sheer terror, I did not feel any pain. We moved deeper along it until pressed into a dark crevice. I could see a helicopter overhead. It hung there for the longest time. Ulu Beg had his Russian gun ready. But then the helicopter rose from the sky and vanished. Two columns of smoke rose in the sky, one huge and black and the other green.