Lovers and Liars Trilogy (110 page)

He looked down at her bloodless face, and then, with a cold sense of recognition, he understood. No needle tracks, so it was unlikely to be heroin. What then—pills? Crack?

He straightened up, listening to the sudden clamor of voices from six years before: a gunshot wound to the neck; Esther dying on the sidewalk one bright summer’s afternoon.

So many different kinds of victims. The girl’s eyes were open, as Esther’s had been open; with sightless fixity she gazed up at the sky.

Rowland averted his face. His hands had begun shaking. From the valley below came shouts; he glimpsed the beams of flashlights. The boy who took Esther’s purse, then shot her, had been hooked on crack since the age of twelve; he was poor, black, semiliterate, and fatherless. A born victim.

This girl was wearing a gold bracelet. Her clothes, if odd, were expensive. There were no indications here of deprivation. She had a choice, Rowland thought angrily; then, regretting his anger, and pitying her, he bent again and covered her face with his coat. The wind was stronger now, and it had begun to rain.

G
INI SLEPT FOR THREE
hours. She woke at six, and at once rose. She drew back the curtains; outside it was still dark. She washed and pulled on some clothes quickly, then padded down the stairs.

In the kitchen the dogs greeted her, whimpering, and thumping their tails. No one else was up, not even the children; the whole house was quiet. She boiled some water on the peculiar Aga stove that Charlotte swore by, and made herself some instant coffee. Her hands were unsteady, and her heart was beating very fast. It was now three days since she had last spoken to Pascal. It was six-thirty here, seven-thirty in Sarajevo.

She padded through to Max’s study, which he had said she should use, closed the door, and stared at the telephones. In this room Max had installed all the hi-tech paraphernalia of the modern world. There was a Macintosh, a plain-paper fax machine, a laptop which he used when traveling, and two separate phone lines. Both phones had answering machines, and Pascal had both numbers. Max must have switched them to answer mode before he went to bed; two unwinking red lights met her gaze. During the night no one had called for Max, or for her.

She sat down and began punching in the number. She got through to the hotel on the third try. It rang for a long time. She could see the hotel lobby as she waited, see the press of journalists and TV crews and cameramen who would already be assembling there at this hour. She could see the stairs, and the elevators that rarely worked; she could see the room she and Pascal had shared. It was ugly, brown and orange; it had a 1970s picture window with antiblast tape on the glass.

“Lie beside me. Let me hold you,” Pascal had said the day they returned from the hospital in Mostar. She had done as he bid. She lay in his arms, trembling. Tomorrow she would have to file her account of this particular incident. She could hear words in her head, and they all sounded hollow. She stared across the room at the window. Outside, the light was failing. She was beyond exhaustion, also afraid to close her eyes.

“Tell me what you saw. Tell me what you thought.” Pascal stroked her hair very gently. It was still long, still uncut. He pushed it back from her face and made her turn toward him. “Darling, you have to do that. If you shut it away inside yourself, you’ll never be free of it. Gini, please believe me. I know.”

“You know what I saw.” She found it hard to shape the words. “You saw it too.”

“No.” He took her hand quietly in his. “In that situation, no two people see exactly the same thing.”

She allowed herself to look at him then. She could see the fatigue in his much-loved face; she could see regret and resignation but also strength in his eyes. Whatever I have seen, she thought, he has seen worse—many, many times.

“Gini, it isn’t a cure, I’m not saying that.” His hand tightened around hers. “There is no cure. You know that. You live with me. Once that door’s unlocked, you can never close it again. There’s a divide, Gini, between people who’ve been through that doorway and those who have not. I warned you of this before.”

“I know you did.”

“But for us there’s no divide.” He drew her toward him. “Gini, don’t create one. Tell me, darling. Let me see what you saw.”

So Gini tried. She tracked it, that former municipal building, on the outskirts of Mostar, a place surrounded by the shells of buildings, a place that had, for the past two months, housed the city’s improvised hospital wards.

They had been in the long room reserved for the seriously injured. At one end were the soldiers, at the other, civilians. There were only a few children in this ward, and Gini, entering it, had been relieved. She had been interviewing a nurse, then one of the local doctors, who had been up all night operating on patients without benefit of anesthetic. She was joined by one of the volunteer doctors, a Frenchman Pascal knew from Médecins sans Frontières. With him had come a much-needed supply of painkillers and antibiotics. Gini helped him unpack these, then allowed him to lead her over to the end bed. He introduced her to the ten-year-old boy who lay there, for whom he had brought a chocolate bar. Both the boy’s parents had been killed two weeks before. The boy’s leg had been amputated at the knee; his right arm had sustained a minor shrapnel wound. By his bed crouched his seven-year-old sister, who refused to be parted from him. She was physically unhurt, but had spoken to no one except her brother for fourteen days.

Gini sat by the boy and talked to him, the French doctor translating. The pain and compassion she felt were so deep, they felt as eloquent as any language. The conversation faltered to an end; she hoped, passionately hoped, that this boy, with his thin face and dark, watchful eyes, would understand the concern for him she felt, even if that concern was useless and could bring him no ease.

Throughout the conversation the boy’s sister never once raised her head. She shivered continually; she clutched her brother’s hand. The doctor, seeing Gini’s expression, intervened. He said a few words, then drew her back down the length of the ward, and into a corridor beyond. In the distance, somewhere, as always, guns boomed. The doctor was thin, bearded, about five years younger than she was. He looked at her closely.

“How long have you been here?”

“Three months. Nearly four.”

“Then listen to me. That boy will survive. So will his sister. Now that we have penicillin, his wound will heal.”

Gini looked back over her shoulder. Pascal, his face grim, was moving toward the boy’s end of the ward. She said: “Survive? He has no parents. No home. He’s ten years old. You saw his eyes.”

She covered her face with her hands. The young doctor continued to watch her quietly.

“Nonetheless. He’ll survive. You cannot get emotionally involved—you do realize that, don’t you?” He hesitated. “I never ask their circumstances. I prefer not to know their names. I just make sure they get bandages, medication, because otherwise, they’ll die. That’s my function. Your function—”

“Mine?” Gini jerked up to look at him. She was crying, and no longer cared who saw the tears. “My function? What in God’s name is my function? I feel useless—
worse
than useless. I feel like a
voyeur
.”

“That’s predictable. It will pass.” He glanced away, some sound outside catching his attention. There was the noise of running footsteps, a shout, then quiet. Moving away from the window, the doctor took her arm.

“You have a function,” he said. “Ask Pascal. You elicit sympathy. Indignation.” He gave her a cool glance. “Then people write checks. Politicians feel pressured. And over here”—he glanced around again, frowning—“we get the mercy flights. The relief doctors. The supplies.
That’s
your function. To write. So do it. Describe this godforsaken place.
Make
people see it. Describe that child.”

“It’s not enough.” Gini began to turn away. “It’s inadequate. You know that.”

“You have a better suggestion? Can you nurse? You have a medical degree?”

He continued speaking, Gini thought for a fraction of a second after that, though she could not hear his words. Swinging back toward him, she saw his face change as the air went dark. Something warm, moving fast, brushed her skin, broke them apart, picked them up as if they were weightless, and tossed them to the ground. There was a long, slow, wallowing sound, then that deep, sucking exhalation she had come to fear. She could hear the crush of masonry falling, then silence, then running footsteps, then screams.

Thirty seconds? Sixty seconds? She groped her way across the corridor, crawled to the entrance to the ward. Dust billowed, curled into her throat and eyes, then slowly began to thin and settle. One section of the ward was missing. The three beds at the far end of it were missing. The boy she had been with not five minutes earlier was gone, and so was his sister. For one long, silent moment of stupefaction and agony, she thought:
and so is Pascal.

She helped to clear that fallen masonry, clawing at the powdery stone; she knew enough by now to know there was very little hope, and Pascal, safe, uninjured, working beside her, also knew this. When it was clear to them both that no miracle had occurred, he rose, drew her to her feet, and led her away.

Lying on that bed in the hotel room, back in Sarajevo, she tried to spell this out to him. She wanted to say:
why?
Why did the two doctors survive, and the nurse, and the other patients, and you and I? Why could that boy not have been spared, the boy and his sister? In the end, that was all she could say: one last, long, impotent
why.

Pascal waited until she had finished speaking. His arms tightened around her. He wiped the tears from her cheeks and kissed her closed eyes.

“Why? Because it’s random,” he said at last, quietly. “Because it’s always random and arbitrary. An old woman will be spared, a young child will die. A soldier who raped two women the previous day will survive, and some innocent bystander will not. Gini, don’t try to find shape and meaning in this. There is none.”

“There’s no God.” With a sudden furious gesture she rose from the bed and turned away. “No God. Cannot be. I see that now.”

“Not one that I would want to worship. No.” Pascal watched her in silence. She began to weep bitterly, burying her face in her hands.

“I want that boy
back
,” Pascal heard her say. She choked on her words. “I want—that doctor said he’d survive. Pascal…” She raised her face and swung around to look at him. “How can you bear this? How
can
you? How can you look at these things, year after year? I thought—if I steeled myself—I could—” She broke off and bent her head. “I can’t—I think… I can’t
hope
anymore.”

At that, Pascal rose and again took her in his arms. He waited until the storm of weeping ceased, and she grew calmer.

“I love you,” he said, lifting her face to his.

“I love you, and I know that you love me. That boy—was loved. You will remember him. I will remember him. Isn’t there some hope there?”

His voice, and his face, were grave. Gini, looking up, met the steadiness of his gaze. Unbidden and unexpected, and for the first time in weeks, a physical longing for him stabbed up through her body. It was like a cut from a knife, and it made her ashamed. Fighting it, she rested her face against his chest and listened to the beat of his heart.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Pascal said, and he was right: he did know a great deal of what she was thinking, though not perhaps all. “It’s so fragile—yes? And love is no protection. Death could always be around the next corner, not five minutes away?”

“Yes. That. And—”

“No justice.” He kissed her bent head, then sighed. “Oh, Gini, don’t you see? This is what I was trying to warn you about. I knew this would happen to you. And it’s the hardest thing of all….”

The number was still ringing in Sarajevo. They picked up finally on the twentieth ring. She was lucky this time, for often she obtained one of the desk clerks who spoke poor English. This time it was the nineteen-year-old, the one who prided himself on his grasp of idiom, acquired from years of watching American gangster films.

He said Pascal had checked out; he’d returned that morning at four and left again half an hour later. For two hours the previous evening he had been trying to reach her, but the lines had been bad again. But he had received some of her messages, it seemed, and he would call her, without fail, in the next twenty-four hours.

Gini’s hands were shaking. She replaced the receiver and buried her face in her hands. She knew what that message really meant, and why it had been made to sound reassuring. It meant Pascal had some lead. It meant he had set off somewhere more dangerous than Sarajevo, before light came. There was usually a lull in military activities in the early morning; there was less likelihood of snipers, or of a sudden bombardment, in the few hours before dawn.

She could feel the fear mounting, this terrible disabling panic that always seemed to attack her when she was least prepared. She made herself get up and leave the room. She made herself be active. Returning to the kitchen, she washed the few dishes Charlotte had left in the sink, then pulled on a coat and took the dogs for a short run.

She walked around the garden, and the orchard, her footsteps leaving prints in the frosted grass. She looked up at the fields and the bare hills beyond, and tried to tell herself that this state of mind and state of heart would pass. The random would not occur. Pascal would be safe, and soon, surely soon, he would return. They might even come here, as Charlotte had suggested. They could walk in the hills in the warmth of a summer evening. Just a few months, and this landscape would be transformed. The trees would be in leaf; there would be flowers in bloom. She would love Pascal, and he would love her, and they would be able to talk or be silent, and once again they would both be secure.

Except… She turned back to the house and let herself into the silent kitchen. She sat down at the table and stared unseeingly at the wall. Except: she would rather not have remembered, but she could not forget the conversation with Helen, Pascal’s ex-wife, that had taken place in London shortly before Christmas, four weeks before.