The Walking Dead

The waistcoat was carefully threaded over them. The weight settled on his shoulders, was a burden, and Ibrahim had to flex his upper-body muscles. Fingers were tugging at the material, straightening, raising, loosening it. He was in the tailor's shop on the Corniche; his father sat and watched with smiling pride because a sole surviving son had come of age; a tailor who was a distant cousin of his father fussed over the fall of a robe that was held together with pins and had yet to be finished to perfection, new clothing for the start of a student's first term at the medical school. Cased in plastic gloves, fingers probed and poked, then more tape was bound tight over the most protruding joins with the shiny silver detonators.

'Is it comfortable?' The question was asked with less respect than the tailor, the distant cousin of his father, would have given, but it was the same question. Then, in the flush of youth, the excitement of going away and beginning his studies, he had pirouetted and the robe had swung free at his hips and knees; his father had clapped. He did not know what he should answer, and the flies rose from the bags and flew into his eyes, nose and ears. He. was told, 'It has to be comfortable. If it is not comfortable, you will walk with discomfort and bad walking is recognized. A man who walks well is not noticed, but he must be comfortable — or he betrays himself.'

'I am comfortable,' Ibrahim said hoarsely. 'But the flies are…'

He was interrupted, as if his query was unimportant. 'No matter, there is a spray in the kitchen that will kill them. What concerns me — is it too tight, is it awkward? I can take out a vent at the back if you need it looser.'

'It is not awkward.'

The jacket was lifted off the hack of the chair and passed to him.

'You will wear this? It is a good length. It is heavy enough not to show a bulge on your chest. Try with the jacket, but gently because the connections are not yet finally fastened. Do it.'

He smelt the leather, felt its strength, put his arms into the sleeves and let it settle on him.

'Button it, but not roughly.'

He did as he was told. The fingers were back at his chest and pulled at the jacket's front. He saw a flitting, coarse smile of satisfaction.

'Much room, enough, not too tight…You can take them off, but carefully.'

He dropped the jacket on to the floor, then worked the waistcoat off his shoulders, and felt freedom when he had shed its weight. It was taken from him and laid again on the table, but the flies were still in his face.

'What do I do now?'

'If you have a complaint about the waistcoat, you tell me. If you have no complaint, you go back to your room. Do not misunderstand me, young man. I am not a coffee-house talker. I am not a recruiter who persuades young men to rush towards Heaven. Others talk and others persuade, but I am an expert in ordnance. I am a fighter and I use what weapons are available to me. It was your choice to volunteer and your motivation is not my concern. Do you have a complaint?'

'No.'

'Then go back to your room.'

Ibrahim turned, bent and picked up the jacket that was his prized possession. He told himself, harsh words in silence, that he was not afraid, that he did not need to be comforted. He let himself out of the room and did not look back at the table and the waistcoat.

* * *

'If it is a problem, drop your trousers and piss on it.'

Tariq, now the Engineer, had learned the value of the suicide attack, of martyrs to God, as a junior lieutenant aged eighteen, serving in the front line of the Fao peninsula.

The problem was the overheated barrel of a PKMB 7.62mm Russian-built light machine-gun.

What the platoon sergeant had told him, Tariq had done. He had exposed himself, his head and shoulders above the parapet of sandbags. He had crouched over the barrel, loosened his belt, lowered his trousers and urinated on the barrel; steam in a vapour cloud had hissed off the metal. Then he had loaded another belt of ammunition, fired again — and they had kept coming.

The machine-gun position nearest him, thirty paces to his right, was abandoned. In the one to his left, fifty paces from him, the gunner had collapsed over the stock of his weapon and the corporal shook with convulsive sobbing. It was hard to kill kids. One man had run from the children's advance and another had collapsed, but Tariq had continued to shoot with bursts of six to nine bullets each time his finger locked on the trigger.

He knew that their ayatollah had said: 'The more people die for our cause, the stronger we become.'