"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 Gui, 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
