The Templar Inheritance (16 page)

THIRTY-SIX

Hart showered and brushed his teeth. Then he lay in bed with the lights off and thought about Nalan. She had gone as far as she dared go with him; that much was clear. Her aunt and uncle had set her up for an arranged marriage, and she intended to go through with it, come what may. It was the right thing for her to do, he couldn’t deny that. For where would an affair with him lead her? Absolutely nowhere. The last thing she needed to be doing at this point in her life was to betray her intended husband and prejudice her future.

There was a soft knock at his French windows. So soft that he wasn’t quite sure that he had heard it.

Hart sat up in bed. Something told him not to switch on the light. He moved to the window and opened the curtains. Nalan stood outside. She was dressed in black jeans and a loose brown T-shirt.

He pulled the French windows open and allowed her to slip in past him.

‘We need to talk, John. In private. And this is the best place to do it. But don’t switch on the lights. It is safer that way.’

As she passed him, her hair drifted across his wrist. Hart was tempted to reach across and take it into his hands – to lower his face into it and breathe in its perfume. Instead he closed the sliding doors and drew the curtains back into place as if it was every night of the year that a desirable young woman entered his bedroom unexpectedly as if in answer to a prayer.

‘I’m sorry. You were in bed.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I wasn’t asleep. Just sitting here thinking.’

‘Climb back in. I will sit on the other side. We can talk better that way. And it will be warmer for you.’

Hart was grateful, now, that he had decided to go to bed in his T-shirt and underpants, thanks to the cold, rather than in his more usual nude state. Despite this, he found himself utterly wrong-footed by his own prejudices. Nalan seemed perfectly comfortable alone with him in his room. It was he who was attributing some ulterior motive to her every act. It made perfect sense for her to go back to her own room, change, slip out the back way, well protected from the street lights, and come and talk to him privately. Hell, what they were intending to do was sheer madness. They needed to discuss it first. And in the strictest possible privacy. It was only he who was letting other stuff get in the way of it.

He got back into bed and leaned against the headboard. Nalan did the same on her side. She glanced across at him.
Her face was lit up from the reflection of the street lights which leached in through the fanlight above the front door of the bungalow. The light caught the edges of her hair and turned them gold, like an aureole around her head. She looked more beautiful than ever in the half-light. Hart tried to relax, but it was impossible.

‘The men coming to see us tomorrow lunchtime are called
kulbar
. They are cross-border couriers. Men who carry tyres and tobacco and textiles and electronic goods across the border illegally. These men are often killed by snipers, or border police waiting in ambush for them. But they know every way and means to cross the border. Every track. How to evade the Iranian drones which pick up the heat of the bodies at night.’

‘How is that possible?’

‘They travel by horseback. Or with sheep. The drones are not as clever as the ones the Americans have. They find it difficult to differentiate between man and animal. And there are so many
kulbar
and
kasebkar
going across at any one time, what are the Iranians going to do? Massacre them all? Smuggling is illegal, yes. But the normal punishment is usually only a few months’ detention or a fine. It is only recently – from 2012 onwards – that the border guards have started shooting. There has been much anger about this. More than one hundred
kulbars
have been killed already. Many others wounded. There is a campaign to stop these abuses. Far less are shot now. Now they shoot mostly only the horses.’

‘Mostly? That’s encouraging.’

‘You will go across with one of the
kulbar
tomorrow night. You will dress in Kurdish clothes. Baggy trousers. Baggy shirt. A turban showing to which tribe you belong. White rubber boots.’

‘White rubber boots?’

‘Yes. Many Kurdish men in Iran wear them. I do not know why. Perhaps it is a fashion?’ She burst out laughing. ‘I hope they can find some big enough to fit you.’

Hart was having a hard time trying to keep his attention focused entirely on what Nalan was saying. ‘And you?’

‘I shall be going over by taxi, as I always do. Then my cousin will pick me up on the other side of the border.’

‘Does Hassif know you are coming?’

‘Of course not. No. This would be madness. I want to surprise him.’

Hart was tempted to say something flip. About how crazy she was to think she could outwit a worm like Hassif. Something along those lines. Then he realized that he was on pretty shaky ground himself.

For the very first time he felt that familiar hollowness in the stomach he’d grown used to when taking photographs on the front line of a conflict. He called it battle nerves whenever he chose to dissect the feeling for himself. Other people, he knew, might call it fear. It was something you had to work your way through. Either that, or give up on your profession.

‘Do you have any idea what you intend to do when you find him?’

‘I have an idea, yes.’

‘And are you willing to share that idea with me?’

‘No. It is better you have no knowledge of what I am going to do.’

‘You’re not intending to try and kill him, are you?’

Nalan brushed away his question with a hand gesture. ‘I will not talk about it. Much depends on my male cousins. My father was leader of our tribe. He was a respected man. It is not only I who have a score to settle with Hassif. My tribe have a blood feud with him. Now that he has revealed himself to us, everything has changed. Before this, no one knew where he had gone. Even if he was still alive. Now we know. For he has spoken to me in person. This was a big mistake for him. Though he will not realize it. He is an old man who thinks he is young. And such a man is very stupid. Old age should bring wisdom and not vanity. Vanity is for the young.’

Hart turned to her. ‘You speak as if you are old yourself. You are twenty-seven, Nalan. That is nothing.’

‘One is as old as the things one has experienced. I was old at five. Even older at three. No child should see what Hassif showed me. No child should undergo what he made me undergo.’

‘No. That is true. You are right.’

When Hart thought about it later, he realized that he had no clear idea how Nalan came to be lying in his arms. Had he made the first move? Had she? But there it was. Maybe he had reached across to comfort her? He didn’t know. But she had curled up in his arms and he had drawn the covers over her and they had lain, entwined like that, and saying nothing.

Once, he had tried to kiss her on the lips, but she had shaken her head, and he had respected that. Some time during the night, though, she had kicked off her jeans and had lain tight against him, half naked now, but seemingly certain by this stage that he would not abuse her trust. This time she had allowed herself to be kissed. Later, much later, he had felt her hand snake down to his groin and hold him. Move a little. Then a little more. He had eased his hand in front of her and done the same thing, brushing her nipples with his free fingers. He had felt her breath fluttering against his cheek. Had heard her cry out in ecstasy, just as he, later, had cried out in his turn.

When he awoke again, around five o’clock, he realized she had gone, like a wraith, back to her own room. He felt her side of the bed for residual warmth, and when he found none, he rolled over and lay where she had lain, with his head in her pillow, drinking in her scent.

He had heard French people speaking of
les nuits blanches
, sleepless nights – nights spent together but without having penetrative sex, perhaps? – but he had never experienced one. Now he had. And it had been the most complete experience of his life.

THIRTY-SEVEN

The
kulbar
and his son stood incongruously next to the swings in the children’s playground near to Hart’s and Nalan’s bungalows at the Pank Tourist Village. The boy was young enough, in Hart’s opinion, to consider playing on them, but the hard lines of his face and the wariness in his eyes suggested that he had seen far too much harshness in real life to retain any boyish outlook at all.

The moustachioed older man was dressed in a blue and white striped collarless shirt with a T-shirt visible underneath, baggy Kurdish trousers and, yes, just as Nalan had forecast, white wellington boots. He wore a red and white turban, or
jamadani
, around his head, indicating his adherence to the Barzani clan, but his son, not being considered a man yet, was bareheaded.

‘I cannot tell you this man’s real name. But you may call him Ronas, and his son Bemo. They are travelling across the border tonight with a consignment of cigarettes for a village
near Piranshahr. They have agreed to take you across with them. You must give them a hundred dollars.’

‘A hundred dollars?’

‘Is that too much?’

Hart shook his head. ‘No. It seems incredibly cheap. Seeing as they will be risking their lives for me.’

‘They risk their lives every time they go across the border. Usually for about ten dollars in profits. You will be making their voyage a lucrative one. The equivalent of ten normal journeys.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘This is their reality, John. It is far removed from your own, I think.’

‘You might say that.’

‘If you are attacked they will leave you. Their only job is to get you across the border. Once you get to the village they will show you a safe place to wait. I will come with my cousin and pick you up.’

‘What if you don’t show up?’

‘Then you will be a blond-haired Britannia sitting in a village in Iran, with no entry or exit visa, and in Kurdish costume.’ Nalan started to smile, but stopped herself in time. ‘You can still say no to this. Give them ten dollars and they will go away and forget you. This is a good tribe. Very honourable. Not like some.’

‘No. If you’re going, I’m going.’

Nalan dropped her eyes. But not before Hart saw the echo of their night together flashed back at him.

‘Please give me the money.’

Hart handed over the hundred dollars. ‘Are you sure. . .’

‘I am sure. These people do what they say they do.’

The older man, Ronas, gave Hart a low salutation with his hand, but the boy, Bemo, seeing the amount of money his father was pocketing, raised his salutation to above the eyes, which Nalan had explained to Hart meant deep respect.

If a hundred dollars is all it takes to buy deep respect, Hart found himself thinking, it is no surprise these countries are all so corrupt.

The man and the boy walked off. Hart watched them for a while. ‘He really takes the boy across with him?’

‘It is a spare pair of shoulders that costs him nothing. They can almost double the number of cigarettes they traffic like this.’

‘How come they make so little money then?’

‘Because another man buys the cigarettes over at the Turkish border and employs them as
kulbars
.’

‘So they take the risks and he gets the profits?’

‘Yes. That is the way of the world, is it not?’

THIRTY-EIGHT

That night, Ronas and Bemo were waiting for him three kilometres from the border area, on a stony track leading to a hamlet of partially thatched and partially corrugated houses.

Hart had left his mobile phone, his clothes, and all his cameras – bar one Zeiss-lensed pocket camera – behind at the Pank Resort, in storage, just as Nalan had suggested to him. His passport and his money were hanging from his belt in a leather pouch tucked down inside the waistband of his trousers.

Once the lights of the taxi had disappeared safely down the track, Hart transferred the belt and pouch to the inside of the capacious Kurdish trousers Ronas had brought for him. He slid on a thick woollen shirt over his T-shirt, and wriggled inside the matted shepherd’s coat that Ronas had used to wrap the bundle of clothing in. Then the two of them, father and son, grinning broadly as if they were about to play a practical joke on him, placed a conical cap onto his head, and wound
a turban tightly around the cap until it was firmly in place. The turban felt fine, but Hart couldn’t help wondering for a moment whether he wouldn’t get fleas from the coat. In the end he decided that fleas were the least of his worries.

The oddest thing of all was that there was no way that he and the two Kurds could communicate beyond the most primitive of hand signals or the cautious exchange of smiles. They spoke no English and he no Kurdish. Nalan had warned him of this, but the reality came as a shock. He would be entirely in their hands, with no ability to influence what was happening to him. As a means of disempowerment, it was shatteringly complete.

Ronas switched off his torch and hid it deep inside his coat. Then he signalled to his son and Hart to follow him. Hart set off after the two figures in what now seemed to him to be pitch darkness. After a little while his eyes began to accustom themselves to the small quantities of residual light reflecting off the rocks around him. He gradually made out that they were passing down a stony, well-worn track. After about half an hour they came to a clearing. A horse was tethered to the single remaining tree in the centre of the clearing. The horse had been fitted with a wooden frame in lieu of a saddle. Ronas and Bemo began loading the horse with cartons of cigarettes. Hart motioned to them that he would like to help, but they shook their heads.

When the horse was fully laden, and its burden covered with plastic sheeting, Ronas turned to his son. Bemo slung an empty sack onto his back, supported by three ropes – one
around the waist and two over his shoulders, effectively turning the sack into a large rucksack. Ronas filled the sack to bursting. Then he beckoned Hart across and went through the same process with him. Before he did so he pointed up at the sky with a warning look on his face. Hart assumed this meant that Ronas was aware of the Iranian drones, and that he felt that carrying the sackful of cigarettes would break up Hart’s silhouette and perhaps afford him a little camouflage. But the gulf between them was so immense that, for all he knew, Ronas could have been suggesting something entirely different.

Hart reckoned, by the end of the loading process, that Ronas had burdened him with a minimum of 8,000 cigarettes, or a rough tally of forty or so cartons. They weighed a significant amount. Hart began to dread the walk ahead of him. The sack they had given him was the equivalent of carrying a fair-sized toddler on his back without the advantage of comfortable strapping. The ropes were already cutting into his shoulders – he didn’t like to think how he would feel by the time they had completed the border crossing. But he couldn’t fault Ronas’s logic. If one has to take a Britannia across the mountains, one might as well find a use for the bastard.

They began to walk. Hart started to sing songs in his head. He began with ‘Loch Lomond’, as that fitted the smart pace the two Kurds were keeping up. He moved on to ‘My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean’, followed by ‘I Want to Buy a Paper Doll’ and ‘Stardust’. By that time he was pretty much out of songs he actually knew the words to, thanks to his mother’s
early influence, so he went back to the beginning of his repertoire and started over again. He wondered if this was why US Marines sang so loudly and with such irritating constancy when they were out on exercise.

Three hours into their walk Ronas indicated that they should stop for a rest. They were up high now, on the plateau, and the wind was seeping into every crevice of Hart’s coat. He had been sweating, and when the cigarettes were levered off his shoulders, he realized that his back was drenched. He huddled up against a stone and wished he was back at the Pank Resort, in bed, with Nalan lying in his arms. Had she passed through the border yet? He had no watch on him any more, so he had lost any precise sense of time, but his best estimate put it a little after two o’clock in the morning. So yes, she would have passed through a long time ago now.

He accepted some water from Ronas’s gourd, and tried to rub a little circulation back into his frozen hands. He was almost grateful when Ronas loaded him up again and they could resume walking.

It took Hart another hour to warm up. Bemo came to him at one point and handed him some dried meat, similar to biltong, Hart supposed, and he chewed on that while they were walking. Everything was done in the strictest silence. The only movement either of the two Kurds made beyond striding ahead of him in single file up the track was to twitch on the horse’s halter whenever the animal had difficulty negotiating a stony slope.

About five hours into the traverse, the two Kurds in front of him broke away from the established track and along a small defile. This brought them, after twenty minutes of scrambling, onto a smaller, less well-defined track. Hart suspected that they must already be in Iran, and that Ronas was leading them away from where he knew border guards might be lying in wait.

They followed this lesser trail for another hour, with the sun’s rays burgeoning in front of them. Hart was marching in an exhausted rhythm now, like that of a man endeavouring to complete a marathon that has seriously over-faced him – he had given up singing in his head a long time ago. Instead, he plonked his feet wherever the horse’s hind legs fell, trusting that the animal, which was more heavily burdened than he, would be far too tired to consider lashing backwards.

The explosion rocked the earth he was standing on, engulfing him in a minor whirlwind, and causing his ears to hiss in protest. Stones and pieces of debris fell around him like solid rain. Hart was cast back onto his rucksack, with his legs flailing in the air like a cockchafer. For a moment he imagined that he was back in the cafe again, in As Sulaymaniyah, moments after the car bomb attack. But this explosion had been a lesser one than that – almost a thunder crack really, more than a bomb. Hart threw off his pack and hastened past the horse, which was frozen to the spot, its nostrils flaring in fear.

Both Ronas and Bemo were on the ground. Bemo was throwing himself about and moaning. Ronas was silent.
His body was in an awkward position, as if he had collapsed beneath the weight of the burden he was carrying.

Hart stopped when he reached Ronas’s body. The older man’s legs had been blown off below the knee by what could only have been a mine. The body, which was entirely still, seemed almost bled out. Hart suspected that Ronas must have been conscious for some time for the blood to have dispersed like that, which meant that he, Hart, must have been temporarily knocked out by the concussion without realizing it. He’d been mildly concussed only ten days before. Now he prayed that he wasn’t double-concussed. For if he had second-impact syndrome, which he knew from his Hostile Environment Training carried with it the danger of brain swelling and cerebral oedema caused by the brain no longer being able to regulate its own diameter, they’d all be left high and dry. He’d never make it down the mountain again.

He turned to the boy. Bemo was holding his midriff and groaning. Hart bent down and tried to get a look at Bemo’s wound, but the boy wouldn’t let go of his stomach. When Hart tried to prise his hands apart Bemo spat at him. Hart stood up, weaving. He knew what must have happened. They had been walking in single file. Ronas had stepped on a mine – Nalan had warned him that this could happen with mines seeded during the 1980–88 Iran/Iraq War and now partially revealed thanks to precipitation and snow erosion. Ronas had taken the full force of the blast. Bemo, five feet behind his father, had been caught by the residual shrapnel. The horse, eight feet behind Bemo and on a long tether, was
unharmed, and Hart, tucked away behind the horse, had been similarly protected.

Hart knew about landmines. He had seen their effects before. This was an old-style anti-personnel mine, designed to maim and not to kill, so that the enemy would be forced into the logistical nightmare of first providing medical aid and then getting the wounded party out of an ‘at risk’ area. Hart was now faced with a similar dilemma.

He tried again with the boy, but to no avail. Bemo was grasping his stomach almost in anger, his face taut, every sinew on his cheeks and neck drawn tight.

Hart left him for a moment to check again on his father. He bent down and took Ronas’s pulse. It was just as he suspected. The older man was dead. No one could survive such a catastrophic loss of blood and live.

Hart cleared the wooden frame on the horse’s back of all its cigarettes. The sun was above the horizon now, and the full horror of what had happened was clearly visible to him. He loaded Ronas’s body onto the frame and tied it in place with ropes gleaned from the rucksacks. He walked over to Bemo. Bemo was saying something over and over again to him and indicating with his chin. Hart realized that Bemo was pointing to his father’s lower legs, which were lying either side of the track, as if dropped there by a passing bird of prey.

Overcoming his revulsion, Hart gathered up the legs and tucked them inside Ronas’s coat. Only then did Bemo allow himself to be lifted up and placed against his father on the frame. The boy made no sound during this time. But still
he held onto his stomach and refused to allow Hart to look beneath his fingers. Hart decided that there was little use anyway in knowing what lay beneath the boy’s clasped hands, as he had neither medicaments nor bandages to offer – he would only be adding to Bemo’s discomfort by forcing the issue. In this case the boy’s instincts were probably sound.

The sun was well over the hills now. Hart felt furiously unprotected. He started along the track, obsessively searching ahead of himself for the telltale trace of other mines. Whenever he could, he zigzagged from one side of the track to the other – even clambering over rocks, on occasion, using as his logic that thirty-year-old landmines were less likely to be concealed in broken terrain than on a main track.

Behind him, on the horse, Bemo started to groan. Hart stopped what he was doing and searched through Ronas’s coat for the gourd that he knew hung there. Thank Christ it was intact. He gave Bemo some water to sip, and then bathed the boy’s face with his bare hands in an effort to afford him a little extra comfort. At any moment he expected an Iranian border patrol, drawn by the sound of the explosion, to appear over the horizon and take them in. Either that, or a sniper’s bullet. He did not know which would be preferable.

Once, when they reached a fork in the road, he signalled to Bemo that he should tell him which way to go. The boy indicated right with his elbow, and Hart fell into line again, his own stomach clenching and unclenching with fear.

They began a rapid descent on a rocky track, and Hart became more confident that there would be no more mines
hidden in such an unforgiving place. He was desperate for a drink of water himself, but knew that he must keep their small reserve for Bemo, who was drifting in and out of consciousness with alarming regularity.

Fearing that the boy would die if he allowed him to sleep, Hart began asking Bemo for directions at every opportunity. Each time the boy signalled right by raising his elbow, and each time Hart began to doubt more and more what the boy was telling him. Was this really the way to the village? Or were they heading in a long looping circle that would eventually take them back up the mountain again? He had no choice but to follow Bemo’s lead, as he knew for a certainty that, however hard he tried, he would not be able to find his own way back into Iraq. There was no alternative, therefore, but to go forward into Iran – no option but to trust to the boy’s undoubted strength of will, which somehow shone through his dirt-caked face despite the horror of being supported upright on the horse by his own father’s dead and mutilated body.

Two hours later, with the sun blazing down on them, Hart began to hallucinate. Ronas had begun to smell, and Hart imagined that it was he, and not Ronas, who was physically disintegrating. A number of times he stopped walking to open his coat to see if he had not, in fact, been wounded himself, and hadn’t realized it. Bemo was unconscious now, and Hart forced himself to go back and check on the boy’s wound in an effort to break the spell engulfing him. But still, even in this state, Bemo would not allow his hands to be prised apart. Hart moistened his fingers with water and pressed them to Bemo’s
lips, but the boy would not wake up. Hart imagined himself walking eternally around the Azerbaijan mountains leading a horse with two desiccated bodies attached to it.

He took up the halter and set off again. Once, they came to a stream, and he encouraged the horse to drink its fill. He drank himself, when the horse had finished, and replenished the gourd. In the distance, far across a ravine, he saw two shepherds walking behind an immense flock of sheep, but he was too far away to risk shouting, and he did not wish to draw unnecessary attention to himself. For all he knew the men would turn him and the boy over to the authorities. If that were to happen, Bemo would be in a worse position than the one he was in already. Hart doubted very much whether the Iranian authorities would give the boy any medical attention whatsoever under those circumstances. He would probably be shot outright. And what would happen to Hart himself didn’t bear thinking about.