CHAPTER 8
THE BOY DIED.
He had been dead almost an hour when Jane arrived, hot and dusty and exhausted to the point of collapse. The father was waiting for her at the mouth of the cave, looking numb and reproachful. She could tell from his resigned posture and his calm brown eyes that it was all over. He said nothing. She went into the cave and looked at the boy. Too tired to feel angry, she was overwhelmed by disappointment. Jean-Pierre was away and Zahara was deep in mourning, so she had no one with whom to share her grief.
She wept later as she lay in her bed on the roof of the shopkeeper's house, with Chantal, on a tiny mattress beside her, murmuring from time to time in a sleep of contented ignorance. She wept for the father as much as for the dead boy. Like her, he had driven himself beyond ordinary exhaustion in trying to save the boy. How much greater his sadness would be. Her tears blurred the stars before she fell asleep.
She dreamed that Mohammed came to her bed and made love to her while the whole village looked on; then he told her that Jean-Pierre was having an affair with Simone, the wife of the fat journalist Raoul Clermont, and that the two lovers met in Cobak when Jean-Pierre was supposed to be holding a clinic.
Next day she ached all over, as a result of having run most of the way to the little stone hut. It was fortunate, she reflected as she went about her routine chores, that Jean-Pierre had stopped—to rest, presumably —at the little stone hut, giving her a chance to catch up with him. She had been so relieved to see Maggie tethered outside, and to find Jean-Pierre in the hut with that funny little Uzbak man. The two of them had jumped out of their skins when she walked in. It had been almost comical. It was the first time she had ever seen an Afghan stand up when a woman came in.
She walked up the mountainside with her medicine case and opened the cave clinic. As she dealt with the usual cases of malnutrition, malaria, infected wounds and intestinal parasites, she thought over yesterday's crisis. She had never heard of allergic shock before. No doubt people who had to give penicillin injections were normally taught what to do about it, but her training had been so rushed that a lot of things had been left out. In fact the medical details had been almost entirely skimped, on the grounds that Jean-Pierre was a fully qualified doctor and would be around to tell her what to do.
What an anxious time that had been, sitting in classrooms, sometimes with trainee nurses, sometimes on her own, trying to absorb the rules and procedures of medicine and health education, wondering what awaited her in Afghanistan. Some of her lessons had been the opposite of reassuring. Her first task, she had been told, would be to build an earth closet for herself. Why? Because the fastest way of improving the health of people in underdeveloped countries was to stop them using the rivers and streams as toilets, and this could be impressed upon them by setting an example. Her teacher, Stephanie, a bespectacled forty-ish earth-mother type in dungarees and sandals, had also emphasized the dangers of prescribing medicines too generously. Most illnesses and minor injuries would get better without medical help, but primitive (and not-so-primitive) people always wanted pills and potions. Jane recalled that the little Uzbak man had been asking Jean-Pierre for blister ointment. He must have been walking long distances all his life, yet because he had met a doctor he said his feet hurt. The snag about overprescribing—apart from the waste of medicines—was that a drug given for a trivial ailment might cause the patient to develop tolerance, so that when he was seriously ill the treatment would not cure him. Stephanie had also advised Jane to try to work with, rather than against, traditional healers in the community. She had been successful with Rabia. the midwife, but not with Abdullah, the mullah.
Learning the language had been the easiest part. In Paris, before she ever thought of coming to Afghanistan, she had been studying Farsi. the Persian language, with the object of improving her usefulness as an interpreter. Farsi and Dan were dialects of the same language. The other main language in Afghanistan was Pashto, the tongue of the Pushtuns, but Dan was the language of the Tajiks, and the Five Lions Valley was in Tajik territory. Those few Afghans who traveled—the nomads, for example— usually spoke both Pashto and Dari. If they had a European language, it was English or French. The Uzbak man in the stone hut had been speaking French to Jean-Pierre. It was the first time Jane had heard French spoken with an Uzbak accent. It sounded the same as a Russian accent.
Her mind kept returning to the Uzbak during the day. The thought of him nagged her. It was a feeling she sometimes got when she knew there was something important she was supposed to do but could not remember what it was. There had been something odd about him, perhaps.
At noon she closed the clinic, fed and changed Chantal, then cooked a lunch of rice and meat sauce and shared it with Fara. The girl had become utterly devoted to Jane, eager to do anything to please her, reluctant to go home at night. Jane was trying to treat her more as an equal, but this seemed to serve only to increase her adoration.
In the heat of the day Jane left Chantal with Fara and went down to her secret place, the sunny ledge hidden below an overhang on the mountainside. There she did her postnatal exercises, determined to get her figure back. As she clenched her pelvic-floor muscles, she kept visualizing the Uzbak man, rising to his feet in the little stone hut, and the expression of astonishment on his Oriental face. For some reason she felt a sense of impending tragedy.
When she realized the truth it did not come in a sudden flash of insight, but more like an avalanche, starting small but growing inexorably until it swamped everything.
No Afghan would complain of blisters on his feet, even in pretense, for they had no knowledge of such things: it was as unlikely as a Gloucestershire farmer saying he had beri-beri. And no Afghan, no matter how surprised, would react by standing up when a woman walked in. If he was not Afghan, then what was he? His accent told her, though few people would have recognized it: it was only because she was a linguist, speaking both Russian and French, that she was able to recognize that he had been speaking French with a Russian accent.
So Jean-Pierre had met a Russian disguised as an Uzbak in a stone hut at a deserted location.
Was it an accident? That was possible, barely, but she pictured her husband's face when she had walked in, and now she could read the expression which at the time she had not noticed: a look of guilt.
No, it was no accidental encounter—it was a rendezvous. Perhaps it was not the first. Jean-Pierre was constantly traveling to outlying villages to hold clinics—indeed, he was unnecessarily scrupulous about keeping to his schedule of visits, a foolish insistence in a country without calendars and diaries—but not so foolish if there was another schedule, a clandestine series of secret meetings.
And why did he meet the Russian? That, too, was obvious, and hot tears welled up in Jane's eyes as she realized that his purpose must be treachery. He gave them information, of course. He told them about the convoys. He always knew the routes because Mohammed used his maps. He knew the approximate timing because he saw the men leaving, from Banda and from other villages in the Five Lions Valley. He gave this information to the Russians, obviously; and that was why the Russians had become so successful at ambushing convoys in the last year; that was why there were so many grieving widows and sad orphans in the Valley now.
What's wrong with me? she thought in a sudden fit of self-pity, and fresh tears rolled down her cheeks. First Ellis, then Jean-Pierre—why do I pick these bastards? Is there something about a secretive man that appeals to me? Is it the challenge of breaking down his defenses? Am I that crazy?
She remembered Jean-Pierre arguing that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was justified. At some point he had changed his mind, and she thought she had convinced him that he was wrong. Obviously the change had been faked. When he decided to come to Afghanistan to spy for the Russians, he had adopted an anti-Soviet point of view as part of his cover.
Was his love also faked?
The question alone was heartbreaking. She buried her face in her hands. It was almost unthinkable. She had fallen in love with him, married him, kissed his sour-faced mother, got used to his way of making love, survived their first row, struggled to make their partnership work, and given birth to his child in fear and pain—had she done all that for an illusion, a cardboard cutout of a husband, a man who cared for her not at all? It was like walking and running so many miles to ask how to cure the eighteen-year-old boy and then returning to find him already dead. It was worse than that. It was, she imagined, how the boy's father had felt, having carried his son for two days only to see him die.
There was a sensation of fullness in her breasts, and she realized it must be time for Chantal's feed. She put
