‘I saw you watching me last week and now you’re here again,’ she had said when he approached her as she was packing up her books on that second Tuesday. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I was wondering if you’d like to have a coffee with me?’
She stopped and looked up at him, the books now piled high in her arms. ‘No,’ she said, before walking away.
‘Why not?’ he had asked, following her, desperate that these would not be the last words between them.
‘Because you’ve been asking people about me.’
‘Aren’t I allowed to ask about you?’ He had no idea how to salvage his approach.
‘No.’
With the books tucked safely under her arm, he watched her walk off. On his way to work the following Monday, he had found her waiting for him near the place where she read.
‘I will meet you at the kiosk this afternoon, Daniel Abiteboul,’ she offered, without a smile.
As she walked off, he had called after her. ‘How do you know my name?’
‘I asked around about you. You’d better be as nice as they say,’ she called back, without turning around.
A childcare worker with a local Ugandan agency, Amahoro had left her native Rwanda three years before to work in the camp, the same camp she had been born in. When the genocide ended, her parents, like many Rwandan Tutsi, made the trek back across the border to their villages, only to find they were expected to live alongside those who had forced them out of their homes after killing their friends and family. While her ageing parents and the rest of her siblings accepted the situation, Amahoro found she could not. She had no time for the Rwandan version of ‘reconciliation’ forced on the population by the government simply because the jails were too full and so she had returned to the only place she knew: the camp.
‘What does it mean to love?’ Amahoro had asked him as they lay together in his bed many months later, the casual manner of the question belying its seriousness. ‘It means to hurt,’ she said before he had time to answer. ‘You’ll hurt me in the end, Daniel Abiteboul.’
‘Never,’ he had said, pulling her close as he looked into a future he could not even begin to imagine.
And then there had been Alice. The first time he had seen her she had been standing in an MSF clinic in northern Afghanistan, arms akimbo, confronting a man who had just brought his battered and bruised wife in because she had ‘fallen over’.
‘And you’ll sell me a block of flats in Tasmania, right?’ she had said in English to the confused husband.
Stepping in, Daniel had assured the man that his wife would be well cared for before politely asking if he would mind taking a seat while the nurse had a look at her. At the end of a long working day Alice had approached Daniel to apologise for her behaviour. Over a drink that evening she explained that she had been working in Iraq for the previous three years and was new to Afghanistan.
‘I probably shouldn’t have come here,’ she had said. ‘I probably should have called it quits and gone back to nursing geriatrics in Coonabarabran after Iraq.’
While Amahoro had been tall, elegant, seductive and quietly spoken with a will of steel, Alice was her antithesis, although she too had a will of steel. Short and wiry with curly blond hair, Alice was loud and irreverent, partied until dawn and was a fitness freak. The latter addiction was a means of negating the former, she would often tell him with a smile.
From an Australian country town, Alice knew how to ride a horse, drive a tractor and ‘change a wheel with my eyes closed’. ‘I can also probably drink you under the table, Daniel Abiteboul,’ she had said the second time they had a drink together.
‘Is that a challenge?’ he asked.
‘You betcha!’
In every way she was larger than life, but most of all, she was fun. She had made him laugh at a time when it was what he needed the most.
‘I didn’t join MSF to save the frigging the world, you know,’ she said to him late one night. It didn’t take Daniel long to understand that most of her bluster was a façade that had been developed to protect a sensitive young country girl from the teasing banter of four older brothers and the offhand cruelty of adolescent boys in a small town. If anything, Alice was probably too kind and too sensitive for the work she did.
There had never been mention of marriage or family, but they had begun to talk in the long term until the day she was gone. As head of the MSF mission in Afghanistan, Daniel oversaw the repatriation of five of his colleagues’ bodies home to their loved ones, and one of those had been Alice’s. He had returned Alice to Coonabarabran in a box.
It was shortly after her death that he had travelled to the village high in the Hindu Kush. At the time Clem had accused him of running away from his pain. She had no idea what she was talking about. You never ran away from that sort of pain, it was seared into your DNA. Clem urged him to accept the counselling offered by MSF. He refused. He didn’t need counselling. He needed time and he needed distance.
And then there had been Sofia.
The first time he saw Sofia he had returned from a day in the village further down the mountain. As he climbed up over the ridge he had stopped to catch his breath and saw her standing outside the storage hut staring up at the mountains, entranced. At first he thought she was one of the young village women until he saw the long strands of red hair escaping from under the scarf. The attraction
