Lie Down With Lions (10 page)

“I’ll think about it,” Ellis replied.

Ellis’s father belched quietly, begged pardon and said: “That was good.”

Ellis pushed away his dish of cherry pie and whipped cream. He was having to watch his weight for the first time in his life. “Real good, Mom, but I can’t eat any more,” he said apologetically.

“Nobody eats like they used to,” she said. She stood up and began clearing away. “It’s because they go everywhere in cars.”

His father pushed back his chair. “I’ve got some figures to look over.”

“You
still
don’t have an accountant?” Ellis said.

“Nobody takes care of your money as well as you do,” his father said. “You’ll find that out if you ever make any.” He left the room, heading for his den.

Ellis helped his mother clear away. The family had moved into this four-bedroom house in Teaneck, New Jersey, when Ellis was thirteen, but he could remember the move as if it were yesterday. It had been anticipated literally for years. His father had built the house, on his own at first, later using employees of his growing construction business, but always doing the work in slack periods and leaving it when business was good. When they moved in, it was not really finished: the heating did not work, there were no cupboards in the kitchen and nothing had been painted. They got hot water the following day only because Mom threatened divorce otherwise. But it got finished eventually, and Ellis and his brothers and sisters all had room to grow up in it. It was bigger than Mom and Dad needed now, but he hoped they would keep it. It had a good feel about it.

When they had loaded the dishwasher he said: “Mom, do you remember that suitcase I left here when I came back from Asia?”

“Sure. It’s in the closet in the small bedroom.”

“Thanks. I want to look through it.”

“Go on, then. I’ll finish up here.”

Ellis climbed the stairs and went to the little bedroom at the top of the house. It was rarely used, and around the single bed were crowded a couple of broken chairs, an old sofa and four or five cardboard boxes containing children’s books and toys. Ellis opened the cupboard and took out a small black plastic suitcase. He laid it on the bed, turned the combination locks and lifted the lid. There was a musty smell: it had not been opened for a decade. Everything was there: the medals; both the bullets they had taken out of him; Army Field Manual FM 5-31, entitled
Booby Traps
; a picture of Ellis standing beside a helicopter, his first Huey, grinning, looking young and (
oh, shit
) thin; a note from Frankie Amalfi which said
To the bastard that stole my leg
—a brave joke, for Ellis had gently untied Frankie’s lace, then tugged at his boot and pulled away his foot and half his leg, severed at the knee by a wildly flexing rotor blade; Jimmy Jones’s watch, stopped forever at half past five—
You keep it, son,
Jimmy’s father had said to Ellis through an alcoholic haze,
’cause you were his frien’, and that’s more than I ever wuz;
and the diary.

He leafed through the pages. He only had to read a few words to recall a whole day, a week, a battle. The journal began cheerfully, with a sense of adventure, and very self-consciously; and it got progressively disenchanted, somber, bleak, despairing and eventually suicidal. The grim phrases brought vivid scenes to his mind:
goddam Arvins wouldn’t get out of the helicopter, if they’re so keen to be rescued from Communism how come they don’t fight?
and then
Capt. Johnson always was an A. hole I guess but what a way to die, grenaded by one of his own men,
and later
The women have rifles up their skirts and the kids have grenades in their shirts so what the fuck are we supposed to do, surrender?
The last entry read
What is wrong with this war is that we are on the wrong side. We are the bad guys. That is why kids dodge the draft; that is why the Vietnamese won’t fight; that is why we kill women and children; that is why the generals lie to the politicians, and the politicians lie to the reporters, and the newspapers lie to the public.
After that, his thoughts had become too seditious to be committed to paper, his guilt too great to be expiated by mere words. It seemed to him that he would have to spend the rest of his life righting the wrongs he had done in that war. After all these years it still seemed that way. When he added up the murderers he had jailed since then, the kidnappers and the hijackers and the bombers he had arrested, they were as nothing when balanced against the tons of explosives he had dropped and the thousands of rounds of ammunition he had fired in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

It was irrational, he knew. He had realized that when he came back from Paris and reflected for a while on how his job had ruined his life. He had decided to stop trying to redeem the sins of America. But this . . . this was different. Here was a chance to fight for the little guy, to fight against the lying generals and the power brokers and the blinkered journalists—a chance not just to fight, not just to pay a small contribution, but to make a real difference, to change the course of a war, to alter the fate of a country, and to strike a blow for freedom on a big scale.

And then there was Jane.

The mere possibility of seeing her again had rekindled his passion. Just a few days ago he had been able to think of her and the danger she was in, and then put the thought out of his mind and turn the page of the magazine. Now he could hardly stop thinking about her. He wondered whether her hair was long or short, was she fatter or thinner, did she feel good about what she was doing with her life, did the Afghans like her, and—most of all—did she still love Jean-Pierre?
Take my advice,
Gill had said;
check her out.
Clever Gill.

Finally he thought about Petal. I tried, he said to himself; I really tried, and I don’t think I handled it too badly—I think it was a doomed project. Gill and Bernard give her all she needs. There is no room for me in her life. She’s happy without me.

He closed the diary and returned it to the case. Next he took out a small, cheap jeweler’s box. Inside was a small pair of gold earrings, each with a pearl in the center. The woman they had been intended for, a slant-eyed girl with small breasts who had taught him that nothing is taboo, had died—killed by a drunken soldier in a Saigon bar—before he gave them to her. He had not loved her: he had just liked her and felt grateful to her. The earrings were to have been a farewell gift.

He took a plain card and a pen from his shirt pocket. He thought for a minute, then wrote:

To Petal—
Yes, you can have them pierced.
With love from Daddy

CHAPTER SIX

T
he Five Lions River was never warm, but it seemed a little less cold now, in the balmy evening air at the end of a dusty day, when the women came down to their own exclusive stretch of the bank to bathe. Jane gritted her teeth against the chill and waded into the water with the others, lifting her dress inch by inch as it got deeper, until it was up to her waist; then she began to wash: after long practice she had mastered the peculiar Afghan skill of getting clean all over without undressing.

When she had finished she came out of the river, shivering, and stood near Zahara, who was washing her hair in a pool with much splashing and spluttering, and at the same time carrying on a boisterous conversation. Zahara dipped her head in the water one more time, then reached for her towel. She scrabbled around in a hollow in the sandy earth, but the towel was not there. “Where’s my towel?” she yelled. “I put it in this hole. Who stole it?”

Jane picked up the towel from behind Zahara and said: “Here it is. You put it in the wrong hole.”

“That’s what the mullah’s wife said!” Zahara shouted, and the others shrieked with laughter.

Jane was now accepted by the village women as one of them. The last vestiges of reserve or wariness had vanished after the birth of Chantal, which seemed to have confirmed that Jane was a woman like any other.

The talk at the riverside was surprisingly frank—perhaps because the children were left behind in the care of older sisters and grandmothers, but more probably because of Zahara. Her loud voice, her flashing eyes and her rich, throaty laughter dominated the scene. No doubt she was all the more extroverted here for having to repress her personality the rest of the day. She had a vulgar sense of humor, which Jane had not come across in any other Afghan, male or female, and Zahara’s ribald remarks and double-meaning jokes often opened the way for serious discussion. Consequently Jane was sometimes able to turn the evening bathing session into an impromptu health education class. Birth control was the most popular topic, although the women of Banda were more interested in how to ensure pregnancy than how to prevent it. However, there was some sympathy for the idea, which Jane was trying to promote, that a woman was better able to feed and care for her children if they were born two years apart rather than every twelve or fifteen months. Yesterday they had talked about the menstrual cycle, and it transpired that Afghan women thought the fertile time was just before and just after the period. Jane had told them that it was from the twelfth day to the sixteenth, and they appeared to accept this, but she had a disconcerting suspicion that they thought
she
was wrong and were too polite to say so.

Today there was an air of excitement. The latest Pakistan convoy was due back. The men would bring small luxuries—a shawl, some oranges, plastic bangles—as well as the all-important guns, ammunition and explosives for the war.

Zahara’s husband, Ahmed Gul, one of the sons of the midwife Rabia, was leader of the convoy, and Zahara was visibly excited at the prospect of seeing him again. When they were together they were like all Afghan couples: she silent and subservient, he casually imperious. But Jane could tell, by the way they looked at one another, that they were in love; and it was clear from the way Zahara talked that their love was highly physical. Today she was almost beside herself with desire, rubbing her hair dry with fierce, frantic energy. Jane sympathized: she had felt that ways herself sometimes. No doubt she and Zahara had become friends because each recognized a kindred spirit in the other.

Jane’s skin dried almost immediately in the warm, dusty air. It was now the height of summer, and every day was long, dry and hot. The good weather would last a month or two longer, and then for the rest of the year it would be bitterly cold.

Zahara was still interested in yesterday’s topic of conversation. She stopped rubbing her hair for a moment to say: “Whatever anyone says, the way to get pregnant is to Do It every day.”

There was agreement from Halima, the sullen, dark-eyed wife of Mohammed Khan. “And the only way
not
to get pregnant is
never
to Do It.” She had four children, but only one of them—Mousa—was a boy, and she had been disappointed to learn that Jane knew of no way to improve one’s chances of having a boy.

Zahara said: “But then, what do you say to your husband when he comes home after six weeks with a convoy?”

Jane said: “Be like the mullah’s wife, and put it in the wrong hole.”

Zahara roared with laughter. Jane smiled. That was a birth control technique which had not been mentioned in her crash courses in Paris, but it was clear that modern methods would not arrive in the Five Lions Valley for many years yet, so traditional means would have to serve—helped, perhaps, by a little education.

The talk turned to the harvest. The Valley was a sea of golden wheat and bearded barley, but much of it would rot in the fields, for the young men were away fighting most of the time and the older ones found it slow work reaping by moonlight. Toward the end of the summer all the families would add up their sacks of flour and baskets of dried fruit, look at their chickens and goats, and count their pennies; and they would contemplate the coming shortages of eggs and meat, and hazard a guess at this winter’s prices for rice and yogurt; and some of them would pack a few precious possessions and make the long trek across the mountains to set up new homes in the refugee camps of Pakistan, as the shopkeeper had, along with millions of other Afghans.

Jane feared that the Russians would make this evacuation their policy—that, unable to defeat the guerrillas, they would try to destroy the communities within which the guerrillas lived, as the Americans had in Vietnam, by carpet bombing whole areas of the countryside, so that the Five Lions Valley would become an uninhabited wasteland, and Mohammed and Zahara and Rabia would join the homeless, stateless, aimless occupants of the camps. The rebels could not begin to resist an all-out blitzkrieg, for they had virtually no antiaircraft weapons.

It was getting dark. The women began to drift back to the village. Jane walked with Zahara, half listening to the talk and thinking about Chantal. Her feelings about the baby had gone through several stages. Immediately after the birth she had felt exhilarated by relief, triumph and joy, at having produced a living, perfect baby. When the reaction set in she had felt utterly miserable. She had not known how to look after a baby, and contrary to what people said, she had no instinctive knowledge at all. She had been frightened of the baby. There had been no gush of maternal love. Instead she had suffered weird and terrifying dreams and fantasies in which the baby died—dropped in the river, or killed by a bomb, or stolen away in the night by the snow tiger. She still had not told Jean-Pierre about these thoughts in case he should think her mad.

There had been conflicts with her midwife, Rabia Gul. She said women should not breast-feed for the first three days, because what came out was not milk. Jane decided it was ludicrous to believe that nature would make women’s breasts produce something that was bad for newborn babies, and she ignored the old woman’s advice. Rabia also said the baby should not be washed for forty days, but Chantal was bathed every day like any other Western baby. Then Jane had caught Rabia giving Chantal butter mixed with sugar, feeding the stuff to the child on the end of her wrinkled old finger; and Jane had got cross. The next day Rabia went to attend another birth, and sent one of her many granddaughters, a thirteen-year-old called Fara, to help Jane. This was a great improvement. Fara had no preconceptions about child care and simply did as she was told. She required no pay: she worked for her food—which was better at Jane’s house than at Fara’s parents’—and for the privilege of learning about babies in preparation for her own marriage, which would probably take place within a year or two. Jane also thought Rabia might be grooming Fara as a future midwife, in which case the girl would gain kudos from having helped the Western nurse care for her baby.

With Rabia out of the way, Jean-Pierre had come into his own. He was gentle yet confident with Chantal, and considerate and loving with Jane. It was he who had suggested, rather firmly, that Chantal could be given boiled goat’s milk when she woke in the night, and he had improvised a feeding bottle from his medical supplies so that he could be the one to get up. Of course Jane always woke when Chantal cried, and stayed awake while Jean-Pierre fed her; but this was much less tiring, and at last she got rid of that feeling of utter, despairing exhaustion which had been so depressing.

Finally, although she was still anxious and unself-confident, she had found within herself a degree of patience she had never previously possessed; and this, though it was not the deep instinctive knowledge and assurance she had been hoping for, nevertheless enabled her to confront the daily crises with equanimity. Even now, she realized, she had been away from Chantal for almost an hour without worrying.

The group of women reached the cluster of houses which formed the nucleus of the village, and one by one they disappeared behind the mud walls of their courtyards. Jane scared off a flurry of chickens and shoved aside a scrawny cow to get into her own house. Inside, she found Fara singing to Chantal in the lamplight. The baby was alert and wide-eyed, apparently fascinated by the sound of the girl’s singing. It was a lullaby with simple words and a complex, Oriental-sounding tune. She’s such a
pretty
baby, Jane thought, with her fat cheeks and her tiny nose and her blue, blue eyes.

She sent Fara to make tea. The girl was terribly shy and had arrived in fear and trembling to work for the foreigners; but her nervousness was easing, and her initial awe of Jane was gradually turning into something more like adoring loyalty.

A few minutes later Jean-Pierre came in. His baggy cotton trousers and shirt were grimy and bloodstained, and there was dust in his long brown hair and his dark beard. He looked tired. He had been to Khenj, a village ten miles down the Valley, to treat the survivors of a bombing raid. Jane stood on tiptoe to kiss him. “How was it?” she said in French.

“Bad.” He gave her a squeeze, then went to lean over Chantal. “Hello, little one.” He smiled, and Chantal gurgled.

“What happened?” Jane asked.

“It was a family whose house was some distance from the rest of the village, so they thought they were safe,” Jean-Pierre shrugged. “Then some wounded guerrillas were brought in from a skirmish farther south. That’s why I’m so late.” He sat down on a pile of cushions. “Is there any tea?”

“It’s coming,” Jane said. “What kind of skirmish?”

He closed his eyes. “Usual thing. The army came in helicopters and occupied a village for reasons known only to themselves. The villagers fled. The menfolk regrouped, got reinforcements and started to harry the Russians from the hillsides. Casualties on both sides. The guerrillas finally ran out of ammunition and withdrew.”

Jane nodded. She felt sorry for Jean-Pierre: it was a depressing task to tend the victims of a pointless battle. Banda had never been raided, but she lived in constant fear of it—she had a nightmare vision of herself running, running, with Chantal clutched to her, while the helicopters beat the air above and the machine-gun bullets thudded into the dusty ground at her feet.

Fara came in with hot green tea, some of the flat bread they called
nan,
and a stone jar of new butter. Jane and Jean-Pierre began to eat. The butter was a rare treat. Their evening
nan
was usually dipped in yogurt, curds or oil. At midday they normally ate rice with a meat-flavored sauce that might or might not have meat in it. Once a week they had chicken or goat. Jane, eating for two still, indulged in the luxury of an egg every day. At this time of year there was plenty of fresh fruit—apricots, plums, apples, and mulberries by the sackful—for dessert. Jane felt very healthy on this diet, although most English people would have considered it starvation rations, and some Frenchmen would have thought it reason for suicide. She smiled at her husband. “A little more Béarnaise sauce with your steak?”

“No, thank you.” He held out his cup. “Perhaps another drop of the Château Cheval-Blanc.” Jane gave him more tea, and he pretended to taste it as if it were wine, chewing and gargling. “The nineteen sixty-two is an underrated vintage, following as it did the unforgettable sixty-one, but I have always felt that its relative amiability and impeccable good manners give almost as much pleasure as the perfection of elegance which is the austere mark of its highbrow predecessor.”

Jane grinned. He was beginning to feel like himself again.

Chantal cried, and Jane felt an immediate answering twinge in her breasts. She picked up the baby and began to feed her. Jean-Pierre carried on eating. Jane said: “Leave some butter for Fara.”

“Okay.” He took the remains of their supper outside, and returned with a bowl of mulberries. Jane ate while Chantal suckled. Soon the baby fell asleep, but Jane knew she would wake again in a few minutes and want more.

Jean-Pierre pushed away the bowl and said: “I got another complaint about you today.”

“From whom?” Jane said sharply.

Jean-Pierre looked defensive but stubborn. “Mohammed Khan.”

“But he wasn’t speaking for himself.”

“Perhaps not.”

“What did he say?”

“That you have been teaching the village women to be barren.”

Jane sighed. It was not just the stupidity of the village menfolk that annoyed her, but also Jean-Pierre’s accommodating attitude to their complaints. She wanted him to defend her, not defer to her accusers. “Abdullah Karim is behind it, of course,” she said. The mullah’s wife was often at the riverside, and no doubt she reported to her husband everything she heard.

“You may have to stop,” said Jean-Pierre.

“Stop what?” Jane could hear the dangerous tone in her own voice.

“Telling them how to avoid pregnancy.”

That was not a fair description of what Jane taught the women, but she was not willing to defend herself or apologize. “Why should I stop?” she said.