Lie Down With Lions (15 page)

There had to be another way.

She went to the mouth of the cave and stood looking out. Now that the siesta was over, the children had come out of the caves and resumed their games among the rocks and thorny bushes. There was nine-year-old Mousa, the only son of Mohammed—even more spoiled now that he had only one hand—swaggering with the new knife that his doting father had given him. She saw Fara’s mother, toiling up the hill with a bundle of fire-wood on her head. There was the mullah’s wife, washing out Abdullah’s shirt. She did not see Mohammed or his wife, Halima. She knew he was here in Banda, for she had seen him in the morning. He would have eaten with his wife and children in their cave—most families had a cave to themselves. He would be there now, but Jane was reluctant to seek him out openly, for that would scandalize the community, and she needed to be discreet.

What shall I tell him? she thought.

She considered a straightforward appeal:
Do this for me, because I ask it.
It would have worked on any Western man who had fallen in love with her, but Muslim men did not seem to have a romantic idea of love—what Mohammed felt for her was more like a rather tender kind of lust. It certainly did not put him at her disposal. And she wasn’t sure he still felt it anyway. What, then? He did not owe her anything. She had never treated him or his wife. But she had treated Mousa—she had saved the boy’s life. Mohammed owed her a debt of honor.

Do this for me, because I saved your son.
It might work.

But Mohammed would ask why.

More women were appearing, fetching water and sweeping out their caves, tending to animals and preparing food. Jane knew she would see Mohammed shortly.

What shall I say to him?

The Russians know the route of the convoy.

How did they find out?

I don’t know, Mohammed.

Then what makes you so sure?

I can’t tell you. I overheard a conversation. I got a message from the British Secret Service. I have a hunch. I saw it in the cards. I had a dream.

That was it: a dream.

She saw him. He stepped from his cave, tall and handsome, wearing traveling clothes: the round Chitrali cap, like Masud’s, the type most of the guerrillas sported; the mud-colored
pattu,
which served as cloak, towel, blanket and camouflage; and the calf-length leather boots he had taken from the corpse of a Russian soldier. He walked across the clearing with the stride of one who has a long way to go before sundown. He took the footpath down the mountainside, toward the deserted village.

Jane watched his tall figure disappear. It’s now or never, she thought; and she followed him. At first she walked slowly and casually, so that it would not be obvious she was going after Mohammed; then, when she was out of sight of the caves, she broke into a run. She slithered and stumbled down the dusty trail, thinking: I wonder what all this running is doing to my insides. When she saw Mohammed ahead of her she called out to him. He stopped, turned and waited for her.

“God be with you, Mohammed Khan,” she said when she caught up with him.

“And with you, Jane Debout,” he said politely.

She paused, catching her breath. He watched her, wearing an expression of amused tolerance. “How is Mousa?” she said.

“He is well and happy, and learning to use his left hand. He will kill Russians with it one day.”

This was a little joke: the left hand was traditionally used for “dirty” jobs, the right for eating. Jane smiled in acknowledgment of his wit, then said: “I’m so glad we were able to save his life.”

If he thought her ungracious he did not show it. “I am forever in your debt,” he said.

That was what she had been angling for. “There is something you could do for me,” she said.

His expression was unreadable. “If it is within my power . . .”

She looked around for somewhere to sit. They were standing near a bombed house. Stones and earth from the front wall had spilled across the pathway, and they could see inside the building, where the only furnishings left were a cracked pot and, absurdly, a color picture of a Cadillac pinned to a wall. Jane sat on the rubble and, after a moment’s hesitation, Mohammed sat beside her.

“It is within your power,” she said. “But it will cause you some small trouble.”

“What is it?”

“You may think it the whim of a foolish woman.”

“Perhaps.”

“You’ll be tempted to deceive me, by agreeing to my request and then ‘forgetting’ to carry it out.”

“No.”

“I ask you to deal truthfully with me, whether you refuse or not.”

“I shall.”

Enough of that, she thought. “I want you to send a runner to the convoy and order them to change their homeward route.”

He was quite taken aback—he had probably been expecting some trivial, domestic request. “But why?” he said.

“Do you believe in dreams, Mohammed Khan?”

He shrugged. “Dreams are dreams,” he said evasively.

Perhaps that was the wrong approach, she thought, a vision might be better. “While I lay alone in my cave, in the heat of the day, I thought I saw a white pigeon.”

He was suddenly attentive, and she knew she had said the right thing: Afghans believed that white pigeons were sometimes inhabited by spirits.

Jane went on: “But I must have been dreaming, for the bird tried to speak to me.”

“Ah!”

He took that as a sign that she had had a vision, not a dream, Jane thought. She went on: “I couldn’t understand what it was saying, although I listened as hard as I could. I think it was speaking Pashto.”

Mohammed was wide-eyed. “A messenger from Pushtun territory . . .”

“Then I saw Ismael Gul, the son of Rabia, the father of Fara, standing behind the pigeon.” She put her hand on Mohammed’s arm and looked into his eyes, thinking: I could turn you on like an electric light, you vain, foolish man. “There was a knife in his heart, and he was weeping tears of blood. He pointed to the handle of the knife, as if he wanted me to pull it out of his chest. The handle was encrusted with jewels.” Somewhere in the back of her mind she was thinking: Where did I
get
this stuff? “I got up from my bed and walked to him. I was afraid, but I had to save his life. Then, as I reached out to grasp the knife . . .”

“What?”

“He vanished. I think I woke up.”

Mohammed closed his wide-open mouth, recovered his poise and frowned importantly, as if carefully considering the interpretation of the dream. Now, Jane thought, it is time to pander to him a little bit.

“It may be all foolishness,” she said, arranging her face into a little-girl expression, all ready to defer to his superior masculine judgment. “That’s why I ask you to do this
for me,
for the person who saved your son’s life, to give me peace of mind.”

He immediately looked a little haughty. “There is no need to invoke a debt of honor.”

“Does that mean you’ll do it?”

He answered with a question. “What kind of jewels were in the handle of the knife?”

Oh, God, she thought, what is the correct answer supposed to be? She thought to say “Emeralds,” but they were associated with the Five Lions Valley, so it might imply that Ismael had been killed by a traitor in the Valley. “Rubies,” she said.

He nodded slowly. “Did Ismael not speak to you?”

“He seemed to be trying to speak, but unable to.”

He nodded again, and Jane thought: Come
on,
make up your bloody
mind.
At last he said: “The omen is clear. The convoy must be diverted.”

Thank God for that, thought Jane. “I’m so relieved,” she said truthfully. “I didn’t know what to do. Now I can be sure Ahmed will be saved.” She wondered what she could do to nail Mohammed down and make it impossible for him to change his mind. She could not make him swear an oath. She wondered whether to shake his hand. Finally she decided to seal his promise with an even older gesture: she leaned forward and kissed his mouth, quickly but softly, not giving him a chance either to refuse or to respond. “Thank you!” she said. “I know you are a man of your word.” She stood up. Leaving him seated, looking a little dazed, she turned and ran up the path toward the caves.

At the top of the rise she stopped and looked back. Mohammed was striding down the hill, already some distance from the bombed cottage, his head high and his arms swinging. He got a big charge from that kiss, Jane thought. I should be ashamed. I played on his superstition, his vanity and his sexuality. As a feminist I ought not to exploit his preconceptions—psychic woman, submissive woman, coquettish woman—to manipulate him. But it worked. It worked!

She walked on. Next she had to deal with Jean-Pierre. He would be home around dusk: he would have waited until midafternoon, when the sun was a little less hot, before starting on his journey, just as Mohammed had. She felt that Jean-Pierre would be easier to handle than Mohammed had been. For one thing, she could tell the truth with Jean-Pierre. For another, he was in the wrong.

She reached the caves. The little encampment was busy now. A flight of Russian jets soared across the sky. Everyone stopped work to watch them, although they were too high and too far away for bombing. When they had gone the small boys stuck out their arms like wings and ran around making jet-engine sounds. In their imaginary flights, Jane wondered, who were they bombing?

She went into the cave, checked on Chantal, smiled at Fara and took out the journal. Both she and Jean-Pierre wrote in it almost every day. It was primarily a medical record, and they would take it back to Europe with them for the benefit of others who would follow them to Afghanistan. They had been encouraged to record personal feelings and problems, too, so that others would know what to expect; and Jane had written quite full notes on her pregnancy and the birth of Chantal; but it was a highly censored account of her emotional life that had been logged.

She sat with her back to the cave wall and the book on her knee, and wrote the story of the eighteen-year-old boy who had died of allergic shock. It made her feel sad but not depressed—a healthy reaction, she told herself.

She added brief details of today’s minor cases; then, idly, she leafed backward through the volume. The entries in Jean-Pierre’s slapdash, spidery handwriting were highly abbreviated, consisting almost entirely of symptoms, diagnoses, treatments and results:
Worms,
he would write, or
Malaria;
then
Cured
or
Stable
or sometimes
Died.
Jane tended to write sentences such as
She felt better this morning
or
The mother has tuberculosis.
She read about the early days of her pregnancy, sore nipples and thickening thighs and nausea in the morning. She was interested to see that almost a year ago she had written
I’m frightened of Abdullah.
She had forgotten that.

She put the journal away. She and Fara spent the next couple of hours cleaning and tidying up the cave clinic; then it was time to go down into the village and prepare for the night. As she walked down the mountainside and then busied herself in the shopkeeper’s house, Jane considered how to handle her confrontation with Jean-Pierre. She knew what to do—she would take him for a walk, she thought—but she was not sure exactly what to say.

She still had not made up her mind when he arrived a few minutes later. She wiped the dust from his face with a damp towel and gave him green tea in a china cup. He was pleasantly tired, rather than exhausted, she knew: he was capable of walking much longer distances. She sat with him while he drank his tea, trying not to stare at him, thinking: You lied to me. When he had rested for a little while, she said: “Let’s go out, like we used to.”

He was a little surprised. “Where do you want to go?”

“Anywhere. Don’t you remember, last summer, how we used to go out just to enjoy the evening?”

He smiled. “Yes, I do.” She loved him when he smiled like that. He said: “Will we take Chantal?”

“No.” Jane did not want to be distracted. “She’ll be fine with Fara.”

“All right,” he said, faintly bemused.

Jane told Fara to prepare their evening meal—tea, bread and yogurt—then she and Jean-Pierre left the house. The daylight was fading and the evening air was mild and fragrant. This was the best time of day in summer. As they strolled through the fields to the river, she recalled how she had felt on this same pathway last summer: anxious, confused, excited, and determined to succeed. She was proud that she had coped so well, but glad the adventure was about to end.

She began to feel tense as the moment of confrontation drew nearer, even though she kept telling herself that she had nothing to hide, nothing to feel guilty about and nothing to fear. They waded across the river at a place where it spread wide and shallow over a rock shelf; then they climbed a steep, winding path up the face of the cliff on the other side. At the top they sat on the ground and dangled their legs over the precipice. A hundred feet below them, the Five Lions River hurried along, jostling boulders and foaming angrily through the rapids. Jane looked over the Valley. The cultivated ground was crisscrossed with irrigation channels and stone terrace walls. The bright green-and-gold colors of ripening crops made the fields look like shards of colored glass from a smashed toy. Here and there the picture was blemished by bomb damage—fallen walls, blocked ditches, and craters of mud amid the waving grain. The occasional round cap or dark turban showed that some of the men were already at work, bringing in their crops as the Russians parked their jets and put away their bombs for the night. Scarved heads or smaller figures were women and older children, who would help while the light lasted. On the far side of the Valley the farmland struggled to climb the lower slopes of the mountain, but soon surrendered to the dusty rock. From the cluster of houses off to the left the smoke of a few cooking fires rose in pencil-straight lines until the light breeze untidied it. The same breeze brought unintelligible snatches of conversation from the women bathing beyond a bend in the river upstream. Their voices were subdued, and Zahara’s hearty laugh was no longer heard, for she was in mourning. And all because of Jean-Pierre. . . .