Lie Down with Lions (1985)

and crippled children generally died young.

Late in the afternoon Jean-Pierre prepared to leave. He was scheduled to hold a clinic tomorrow in a village several miles away, and—for some reason Jane had never quite understood—he never missed such appointments, even though he knew that no Afghan would have been surprised if he had been a day or even a week late.

By the time he kissed Jane good-bye she was beginning to wonder whether her backache might be the beginning of labor, brought on early by her ordeal with Mousa, but as she had never had a baby before, she could not tell, and it seemed unlikely. She asked Jean-Pierre. “Don’t worry,” he said briskly. “You’ve got another six weeks to wait.” She asked him whether he ought perhaps to stay, just in case, but he thought it was quite unnecessary, and she began to feel foolish; so she let him go, with his medical supplies loaded on a scrawny horse, to reach his destination before dark so that he could begin work first thing in the morning.

When the sun began to set behind the western cliff wall, and the valley was brimful of shadow, Jane walked with the women and children down the mountainside to the darkening village, and the men headed for their fields, to reap their crops while the bombers slept.

The house in which Jane and Jean-Pierre lived actually belonged to the village shopkeeper, who had given up hope of making money in wartime— there was almost nothing to sell—and had decamped, with his family, to Pakistan. The front room, formerly the shop, had been Jean-Pierre’s clinic until the intensity of the summer bombing had driven the villagers to the caves during the day. The house had two back rooms, one would have been for the men and their guests, the other for women and children. Jane and Jean-Pierre used them as bedroom and living room. At the side of the house was a mud-walled courtyard containing the cooking fire and a small pool for washing clothes, dishes and children. The shopkeeper had left behind some homemade wooden furniture, and the villagers had loaned Jane several beautiful rugs for the floors. Jane and Jean-Pierre slept on a mattress, like the Afghans, but they had a down sleeping bag instead of blankets. Like the Afghans, they rolled up the mattress during the day or put it on the flat roof to air in fine weather. In the summer everyone slept on the roofs.

Walking from the cave to the house had a peculiar effect on Jane. Her backache got much worse, and when she reached home she was ready to collapse with pain and exhaustion. She had a desperate urge to pee, but she was too tired to go outside to the latrine, so she used the emergency pot behind the screen in the bedroom. It was then that she noticed a small blood-streaked stain in the crotch of her cotton trousers.

She did not have the energy to climb up the outside ladder onto the roof to fetch the mattress, so she lay on a rug in the bedroom. The “backache” came in waves. She put her hands on her tummy during the next wave, and felt the bulge shift, sticking farther out as the pain increased then flattening again as it eased. Now she was in no doubt that she was having contractions.

She was frightened. She recalled talking to her sister, Pauline, about childbirth. After Pauline’s first, Jane had visited her, taking a bottle of champagne and a little marijuana. When they were both extremely relaxed, Jane had asked what it was really like, and Pauline had replied: “Like shit-ting a melon.” They had giggled for what seemed like hours.

But Pauline had given birth at University College Hospital in the heart of London, not in a mud-brick house in the Five Lions Valley.

Jane thought: What am I going to do?

I mustn’t panic. I must wash myself with warm water and soap; find a sharp scissors and put it in boiling water for fifteen minutes; get clean sheets to lie on; sip liquids; and relax.

But before she could do anything, another contraction began, and this one really hurt. She closed her eyes and tried to take slow, deep, regular breaths, as Jean-Pierre had explained, but it was difficult to be so controlled when all she wanted to do was cry out in fear and pain.

The spasm left her drained. She lay still, recovering. She realized she could not do any of the things she had listed: she could not manage on her own. As soon as she felt strong enough she would get up and go to the nearest house and ask the women to fetch the midwife.

The next contraction came sooner than she had expected, after what seemed like only a minute or two. As the tension reached its peak Jane said aloud: “Why don’t they tell you how much it hurts?”

As soon as it passed its peak she forced herself to get up. The terror of giving birth all alone gave her strength. She hobbled from the bedroom into the living room. She felt a little stronger with each step. She made it out into the courtyard; then suddenly there was a gush of warm fluid between her thighs, and her trousers were instantly drenched: the waters had broken. “Oh, no,” she groaned. She leaned against the doorpost. She was not sure she could walk even a few yards with her trousers falling down like this. She felt humiliated. “I must,” she said; but a new contraction began, and she sank to the ground, thinking: I’m going to have to do this alone.

Next time she opened her eyes there was a man’s face close to her own. He looked like an Arab sheikh: he had dark brown skin, black eyes and a black mustache, and his features were aristocratic—high cheekbones, a Roman nose, white teeth and a long jaw. It was Mohammed Khan, the father of Mousa.

“Thank God,” Jane muttered thickly.

“I came to thank you for saving the life of my only son,” Mohammed said in Dari. “Are you sick?”

“I’m having a baby.”

“Now?” he said, startled.

“Soon. Help me into the house.”

He hesitated—childbirth, like all things uniquely feminine, was considered unclean—but to his credit the hesitation was only momentary. He lifted her to her feet and supported her as she walked through the living room and into the bedroom. She lay down on the rug again. “Get help,” she told him.

He frowned, unsure what to do, looking very boyish and handsome. “Where is Jean-Pierre?”

“Gone to Khawak. I need Rabia.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll send my wife.”

“Before you go . . .”

“Yes?”

“Please give me some water.”

He looked shocked. It was unheard of for a man to serve a woman, even with a simple drink of water.

Jane added: “From the special jug.” She kept handy a jug of filtered boiled water for drinking: this was the only way to avoid the numerous intestinal parasites from which almost all the local people suffered all their lives.

Mohammed decided to flout convention. “Of course,” he said. He went into the next room and returned a moment later with a cup of water. Jane thanked him and sipped gratefully.

“I’ll send Halima to fetch the midwife,” he said.

Halima was his wife. “Thank you,” said Jane. “Tell her to hurry.”

Mohammed left. Jane was lucky it was he and not one of the other men. The others would have refused to touch a sick woman, but Mohammed was different. He was one of the most important guerrillas, and in practice was the local representative of the rebel leader, Masud. Mohammed was only twenty-four, but in this country that was not too young to be a guerrilla leader or to have a nine-year-old son. He had studied in Kabul, he spoke a little French, and he knew that the customs of the Valley were not the only forms of polite behavior in the world. His main responsibility was to organize the convoys to and from Pakistan with their vital supplies of arms and ammunition for the rebels. It was one such convoy that had brought Jane and Jean-Pierre to the Valley.

Waiting for the next contraction, Jane recalled that awful journey. She had thought of herself as a healthy, active and strong person, easily capable of walking all day; but she had not anticipated the shortage of food, the steep climbs, the rough stony paths and the incapacitating diarrhea. For parts of the trip they had moved only at night, for fear of Russian helicopters. They had also had to contend with hostile villagers in places: fearing that the convoy would attract a Russian attack, the locals would refuse to sell food to the guerrillas, or hide behind barred doors, or direct the convoy to a meadow or orchard a few miles away, a perfect camping spot which turned out not to exist.

Because of the Russian attacks, Mohammed changed his routes constantly. Jean-Pierre had got hold of American maps of Afghanistan in Paris, and they were better than anything the rebels had, so Mohammed often came to the house to look at them before sending off a new convoy.

In fact Mohammed came oftener than was really necessary. He also addressed Jane more than Afghan men usually did, and made eye contact with her a little too much, and stole too many glances at her body. She thought