Читать книгу Secret War in Arabia - Shaun Clarke, Shaun Clarke - Страница 5

Framed by the veils of his Arab shemagh, the guerrilla’s face was good-humoured, even kindly. This made it all the more shocking when he expertly jabbed his thin-bladed knife through Sa’id’s eyelid and over the top of his eyeball, twisting it downward to slice through the optic nerve at the back of the retina and gouge the eye from its socket.

The old man’s pain was indescribable, exploding throughout his whole being, drawing from him a scream not recognizably human and making him shudder and strain frantically against his tight bonds. Glancing down through the film of tears in his remaining eye, he saw his own eyeball staring up at him from the small pool of blood in the guerrilla’s hand.

‘Will you now renounce your faith?’ the guerrilla asked. ‘What say you, old man?’

Racked with pain and disbelief, his heart racing too quickly, Sa’id glanced automatically across the clearing. He saw the troops of the Sultan’s Armed Forces lying on the ground, shot dead with pistols, soaked in blood. Directly above them, the bodies of other village elders were dangling lifeless from ropes.

Beyond the hanged men, clouds of smoke were still rising from the smouldering ashes of homes put to the torch. The sounds of wailing women, screaming girls and pleading men rose above sporadic outbursts of gunfire and hoarse, self-satisfied male laughter.

Life in this and the other villages of the country had become nightmarish in recent months, but today, in this particular village, all hell had broken loose.

First, at dawn, the Sultan’s troops had encircled the village to accuse the people of aiding the guerrillas and to prevent them doing so in the future. This they did by torching the whole settlement, cementing over the well without which the villagers could not survive, and hanging a few suspected communist sympathizers from ropes tied to poles hammered hastily into the ground. Then, in the late afternoon, the communist guerrillas had arrived to terrorize the already suffering Muslim villagers and, in particular, to pursue their merciless campaign of making the repected elders of each community renounce their faith.

‘So, old man,’ the guerrilla taunted Sa’id, still holding the bloody eyeball in his hand for him to see, ‘will you renounce your vile Muslim faith or do I gouge out the other one?’

Still in a state of shock, barely aware of his own actions, Sa’id nevertheless managed to croak, ‘No, I cannot do that. No matter what you do to me, I cannot renounce my faith.’

‘You’re a stubborn old goat,’ the guerrilla said. ‘Perhaps, if you don’t care for yourself, you’ll be more concerned for your daughters.’ Casually throwing Sa’id’s eyeball into the dirt, he turned to the armed guerrillas behind him. ‘Take the Muslim bitches,’ he said, ‘and make proper whores of them.’

‘No!’ Sa’id cried out in despair, as the men raced into the ruins of his half-burnt home and the screams of his virgin daughters rent the air. It went on a long time: the girls screaming, the guerrillas laughing, while Sa’id sobbed, strained against his bonds, tasted the blood still pouring from his eye socket, and mercifully slipped in and out of consciousness.

But he was still coherent when his three adolescent daughters, their clothes bloody and hanging in shreds from their bruised, deflowered bodies, were thrown out of the ruins of his mud-and-thatch hut to huddle together, sobbing shamefully, in the dust.

Even as the horrified Sa’id stared at them with his one remaining eye, the guerrilla with the good-humoured face turned to him and asked, ‘Now will you renounce your faith, old man?’

When Sa’id, too shocked to respond, simply stared blankly out of his good eye, the guerrilla snorted with disgust, gouged out his other eye, slashed through his bonds even as the old man was screaming, and stepped aside to let him fall to the ground.

Sa’id could hear his daughters wailing, even though he could not see them. Nor could he see the other raped and beaten women, the men dangling from ropes, the shot SAF troops, the burned ruins of the village huts and the life-giving well sealed with cement. All he saw was the darkness in which he would spend the rest of his days.

Sa’id wept tears of blood.