Right of Thirst (15 page)

Later that night, when there was nothing else to do but try and sleep, I heard footsteps approaching my tent. I'd been dozing, I think, and woke with a start at the sound of boots on gravel, and the glow of a flashlight through the nylon wall. I shook my head to clear it, and then there was a scratch on my door.

I unzipped the tent, and looked out, and it was Elise, looking very young with her headlamp and her rolled-up sleeping bag in her arms.

“I am sorry,” she said, simply. “I do not like this noise.”

“Is Homa awake?” I asked, for some reason.

She shook her head.

“Homa is sleeping. She doesn't know what is happening.”

I paused for a moment, looking at her, and then I opened the flap wide and she crawled in beside me.

I made room for her, suddenly aware of my unwashed body in the close confines of the tent. For a moment I thought she would undress, but she only wriggled out of her jacket and nylon pants, revealing yellow long underwear, and had soon zipped herself into her sleeping bag beside me. She shivered a bit in the cold, and only her face and a few wisps of hair emerged from the mouth of the bag, and then she reached up and switched off the headlamp.

“I'm sorry,” she said again after a few moments. “I could not sleep.”

“What should we do?” she asked, after a while. “Should we stay here? I do not like this. I think maybe we should go down.”

“I don't know,” I said truthfully, after a while. “I'm not sure what we should do. If we left it would all be for nothing.”

“This will delay them more,” she said. “If they ever were going to come. And I'm thinking about what you said about the supplies.”

“You mean that there's not enough?”

“Yes. Not enough. And the general coming. And now this.”

She shook her head in the dark.

“It is always men who do this,” she said. “Always.”

“We'll ask Rai in the morning,” I said.

“I am sure Sanjit does not know,” she said. “I am sure they have told him nothing.”

I didn't reply, and a few moments later she spoke again.

“How did your wife die?” she asked.

“She had a vague pain in her abdomen for more than a year. I thought she was imagining things. But she wasn't.”

“Are you blaming yourself for this?”

“Of course,” I said. “If she'd gone in earlier maybe she would have had a chance.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. There was a long pause. “I am sure it was not your fault.”

“Not completely. But I was always working. Both of us were lonely after our son left home. In some ways we led separate lives at the end.”

“What did she do?”

“She was a portrait painter,” I said. “Bank presidents. Lawyers when they retired. That kind of thing.”

I thought of them, also—the deans and partners who wanted
to leave a bit of themselves behind on the paneling, and were willing to pay for it. Still lifes as well—pears and apples and china. Watercolors of Eric as a child. The fields behind our house. The paintings were good, even excellent. But they were no more than that, and hanging on the wall of even a modest museum, as a few of them did, they hardly attracted a second glance. For her, in some ways, that was the most bitter truth of all.

“Were you ever happy together?” Elise asked, and again she caught me off guard. I paused for a while before answering.

“Yes,” I said, finally. “More in the early days, before we realized how ordinary our lives would turn out to be. But we didn't appreciate what we had. Both of us made that mistake.”

“She was unhappy with you?”

“Not exactly unhappy. But she was never completely content. Neither of us was. We didn't discuss things like that. We were like a lot of couples in that way. We tried to make the best of it.”

And it was true. Many times I'd seen her looking out across the cornfields from the back porch, her thoughts so clear to me; bittersweet, taking her comforts where she could. They were not all that she hoped, I knew, but I'd like to think that it was tolerable enough for her, and if I had my failings and my distances, so, too, did she, and we had many moments of togetherness nonetheless, at times in spite of ourselves, as people always do.

One night, not so long ago, when I was well into my fifties, they had called me in from home. Usually the residents did not require my presence until morning, but the ICUs were full, and the ambulances kept coming, and they could not keep up, and they needed my help. I was just sitting down to dinner when the phone rang. Rachel gave me a long stony look, as she had so many times before, then stood and cleared my plate.

It turned out to be one of the longest nights of my career.
The first patient I saw was an old woman whose heart kept stopping. Refractory ventricular tachycardia, the sawtooth pattern on the screen, and her eyes would roll up in her head, the alarms would shriek, and we'd shock her, and she'd wake up again. Between shocks and the wisps of smoke, she asked us questions—Where am I? What happened?—until finally the electricity did nothing, and I could hear the sound of her ribs popping, one after the other, at the chest compressions. I watched, knowing it was no use, and after a few minutes I told them to stop and tell the family.

Then, without pause, it was on to the others. I'd been up since early that morning, and I was no longer young, and much later that night, as I stumbled through the ICU under the fluorescent lights, I couldn't ever remember being more exhausted. I had to force myself on, drinking cup after cup of coffee, and the EKGs before me, whose patterns had always been clear, seemed like a hundred black lines of calligraphy flowing from one patient to the next.

It was raining when I finally came home the next morning—a driving, cold rain, with low overhanging clouds. I nodded off in my car, then jerked awake and rolled the windows down. The air and rain poured in, staining the leather seats, fogging my glasses, and I could barely make out the road before me.

Our garage was separate from the main house. I was too tired to run across the lawn. Instead I walked, with my head down, soaked through and shivering.

Rachel was in the kitchen listening to the radio, and didn't hear me as I opened the front door. I left a trail of drops all the way down the hardwood floor of the hall. The lights were on, and the kitchen was warm.

I knew how sick she was of my absences, and that she was lonely, that she missed her son in college, that the town was
small, and the commissions few, that somehow she was fifty years old and the art show she'd given a few months before at a local gallery had been attended mostly by acquaintances and friends, or students from her classes, that only a handful of the cheaper works had sold, and the others remained stacked in her studio along with the rest of her hopes—I knew all of that, and so I expected her to greet me with the familiar echo of those things, and I expected to reply in kind—helplessly, with weariness, as if to say, I don't know what else to do, and these are the choices we both have made.

But she didn't greet me like that. Instead, she sighed, and came forward, and put her arms around me, and pulled me close, and I was reminded of the early days again, when her face had lit up as I stood exhausted in the doorway of our apartment in Chicago, home for the morning, together for a few minutes before she went to work.

“You look awful,” she said, as I put my head down on her shoulder. “You look a hundred years old.”

She stepped back, and took a dish towel off the counter, and began to dry my hair.

 

Elise turned on her headlamp.

“Do you mind if I write in my journal?” she said. “I can't sleep.”

“I don't mind.”

I closed my eyes. I heard her fiddling with her bag, the rustle of pages, and then a ticking sound, like sleet against a window. I snuck a glance at her: it was a ballpoint pen, and she was writing intently in her small bound book, a faint frown on her face, in profile, the pages lit up by her headlamp.

She worked away, diligently, in a tiny, paper-saving hand. She
wrote in German, and though I glanced over from time to time, and could see the sentences clearly enough, I understood nothing, not even a single word. I nearly asked her. But she was serious; I could see it in her face. I wondered who she was writing her story for, or whether she even thought of that at all.

As I listened to the pen, I realized that it was an important thing for her. I suspect it was not so much the act itself. I think for her it was more the formal collection of experience, and the dream of understanding it. I'm not sure how I knew this. Perhaps it was her discipline; she continued, without pause, for a long time. I wondered how honest she was being, and what she was saying. I wondered what she'd written about me, because surely I must appear there from time to time. Finally, she closed the book. Then, to my surprise, she leaned over, and kissed me tenderly on the cheek. Before I could respond she switched off the light, plunging the tent into darkness.

“I am sorry,” she said, her voice catching, and after a moment, in the dark, I realized she was crying. But she composed herself quickly, and after a few more minutes she fell asleep, leaving me alone with my thoughts again.

I was so acutely and tenderly aware of her; the way she shifted, her breath, the smell of shampoo that came to me, her patch of warmth against the side of my sleeping bag. It felt strangely familiar, and I realized it was Eric, my son, as a very young child, that I was thinking of. Rachel and I had taken turns putting him to bed. He would shift and murmur beside me for a while—it was before he could speak—and then it would fall over him, his body would relax, his breathing would slow, and I would watch him sleep for a while before easing myself out of the room. It was the same feeling of tenderness, of intimacy and poignancy, and as I lay there beside her it came back to me. I could still feel him as the smallest of children beside me.

The sound grew when the wind blew toward us, and faded when it blew away. At times it was just at the threshold of hearing, and at other times as fully present as the river below us, the sounds merging together—the river and the falling shells—all night. As I lay there half asleep, I felt as if the sound was being poured into my unconscious mind. It reminded me somehow of the northern lights, which I'd seen decades ago, on a solitary camping trip, high on the Michigan lakes.

At first, it had simply been an odd glow on the horizon. It might have been mistaken for a distant city. But there was no city, just open water, and the vast sheets of forest stretching into Canada. The conditions, I learned later, must have been perfect—the right time of year, and clear weather, and sun flares trembling the ionosphere. I was lucky to have seen it, in such profusion—a true display of the aurora, and how it changed, as the hours passed, from a pale glow to a blue, swirling mass, like a deep and fragile creature in the sea. I watched it for hours, sitting beside my small fire. It was the kind of thing one expected to hum, but instead it was accompanied by a delicate and profound silence. It had no distance; it was both very near and very far away. The next night it was gone, and though I saw hints of it several times later in my life, once with Eric in nearly the same place, never again did it reveal itself to me so fully, and with such abandon.

In its own way, the sound of the barrage was as mysterious and as beautiful as the lights in the northern sky had been all those years ago. I knew it was a human thing, of course, that up close it was merely brutality and savagery, but from a distance it sounded like the work of God. In a sense I suppose it was.

The next morning it was gone, but in the afternoon it returned, in fits and starts, and by evening it filled the air around us again. When I finally went to bed, I lay awake for a long time, waiting for her footsteps outside the tent. But she didn't come. No doubt she considered it. But something prevented her, and after a while, as the sleepless hours passed, I suspected it was pride.

I think that place, so unlike anywhere else I had ever been, so full of depths and absences and altitude—I think it was most true to itself at night. That is when the barrage was at its strongest, when it had the greatest reach, where it could carry me back into the past, and ahead into the future, with equal urgency. It showed me who I was most clearly, as if I had been deposited without context; and it made my mind tumble and spin, as if on a frictionless surface.

And as I listened, that second night, the ruined villages kept coming back to me. I imagined the dead, half frozen and rotting in the ground—so many thousands, stopped cold in a minute at four in the morning, the snow and stones on the mountainsides descending like surf, the earth a rippling sea.

The barrage, of course, was from a different instrument entirely. Yet lying there, it was hard not to think of it as a small dark cousin, an echo of a drum, another kind of phantom limb.

The following morning, in the cold clear air, there was only silence as I walked to breakfast, and a wisp of vapor from the cook tent, where Ali and his nephew were at work on our breakfast. My boots were loud on the gravel.

Something caught my eye just then. A flash, high on the ridge, on the far side of the river. I paused for a moment, looking up, but I could see nothing. I thought little of it, and continued, and just as I turned to enter the dining tent I saw it again. I felt a little prickle then, along the back of my neck, but I resisted the impulse to turn around and study the ridge—instead, I simply stepped into the tent, where Rai had already assumed his customary position at the table and Elise, who had arrived before me, stood rubbing her hands by the kerosene heater.

Rai looked up.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Do you have your binoculars here?” I asked him.

“Of course,” he said. “Why?”

“I think I saw something on the ridge,” I said. “A reflection. I'm not sure.”

He came instantly to attention.

“Are you sure?” he said.

“Yes. Something reflecting. Probably a piece of ice or a rock.”

He gestured for me to step away from the door.

“What is it?” Elise asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “Did you see it?”

She shook her head. Rai, meanwhile, had retrieved his heavy binoculars from under the table and stood up. He appeared to be thinking.

“Okay,” he said. “I need you to open the door, just a little.”

“Do you think someone is up there?” I asked.

“I don't know. It is possible, I think.”

So I followed his instructions, and pulled the heavy canvas flap to one side. I understood his intention: from outside, the interior of the tent would have looked dark to any watching eyes.

“I do not like this,” Elise said. No one answered her.

Rai crouched down, training the binoculars up on the ridge. He swept them back and forth for nearly a minute.

“What do you see?” Elise asked him, urgently.

“Nothing,” he said, before standing and letting the binoculars hang from his neck. “But I am not sure where to look. You must try also.”

We exchanged places. I crouched for a while, looking up with my naked eye at the sharp outline of the northeast ridge against the blue sky, trying to remember where I'd seen the flash. It was difficult to say how far away it had been—a half mile, a mile, distances were impossible there. I sat down on the earth floor, and rested my elbows on my knees, and brought the binoculars up.

The binoculars were large and heavy, like those that General Said had used to find the ibex. I swept them back and forth across the gray and tan rock, across the boulders and shadows, the patches of snow and hanging ice. I could see nothing also, but I kept on nonetheless.

“What do you see?” Elise asked again.

“Nothing yet,” I said.

A minute passed, then two. I could sense Rai getting impatient, as he stood with the canvas bundled in his hands.

“You are sure?” he asked, finally.

“No,” I said. “I'm not.”

He kept standing there behind the door, and I went back and forth, like brushstrokes, across the wall.

And then I saw it. Barely discernable, a tiny point making its way slowly back up the gully to the top of the ridge. From that distance, the point was the exact color of the face. It was pains
taking, and slow, immensely small, and every so often it would pause for long seconds and disappear against the rock. I looked as hard as I could, until my eyes began to water. I was reminded of sheets of cells on a microscope slide—the tiny boulders and shadows, so far away they could barely be seen at all, and the moving thing across them.

“There,” I said, my voice louder than I intended.

“What is it?” Rai said.

“Something moving. I think it's a man climbing back up to the ridge.”

“I need to see,” Rai said, calmly. “We must change places. Elise, please hold the door.”

She said nothing, but quickly did as he asked.

Rai crouched beside me, breathing, smelling like cigarettes.

“Start at the highest point,” I said. “Then go left, about one-third of the way. There is a gully, a crack, with boulders below it. I think he's climbing up through the boulders toward the crack.”

Rai took the binoculars from me, adjusting them quickly. He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly, to steady himself. He looked for a long time, saying nothing, convincing himself. The distances were so great, after all, and the forms so small, and it was so hard to be certain.

“I think you are right,” he said finally. “I think it is a man.”

He put the binoculars down, then stood up and began to pace.

“That was very good, Doctor,” he said. “It was very good that you saw him. I did not believe you at first.”

“But who was it?” Elise asked. “What is he doing there?”

“It is the enemy,” Rai said, in the same flat tone.

“How do you know? He could be anyone. He could be from the village.”

Rai shook his head.

“There are no villages across that ridge,” he said. “And it is from the north, across the river. And he is going back. And the reflection means he is carrying field glasses or a telescope. Villagers do not have these.”

He looked at me.

“They have come a long way,” he said. “They are very far south.”

“How many could there be?” I asked.

“Sometimes only one, more often three or four. They are observers.”

Observers, I thought. But who knew what would follow, who knew what they would say into their radios when they were back and out of reach and entirely invisible once again.

Rai opened a case on the table, and withdrew a laminated map, which he spread out on the table and studied carefully. He looked out through the door again, and then, finally, he turned on the satellite phone, and spoke, quickly and urgently, in his native language. He paused, listening, then he looked at me for a long moment, and spoke again. Another pause, and then he recited some numbers, in English, which I realized must be coordinates from the map. Then he repeated them, slowly, as if on command, beginning to pace about the tent as he did so. He looked at me again, and turned off the phone.

“Well,” he said, finally. “I hope that our eyes were not playing tricks on us.”

“Why?” Elise asked. “Are they going to shoot the guns at them?”

Rai shook his head.

“No,” he said. “But I cannot be wrong about this.”

“Did you tell them you were completely certain?” I asked.

He met my eye. “Yes.”

“Are you sure also?” Elise asked me.

I took a deep breath, feeling the weight of responsibility heavily.

“I saw something moving,” I said. “I'm sure of that. But I'm not completely sure it was a man.”

“It was a man,” Rai said, looking directly at me.

I wondered then what it was that I had unleashed. Perhaps nothing, I thought, perhaps it was just another scrap of information pouring in, and no doubt the airwaves were full of them now—sightings, positions. But part of me wished I'd said nothing at all.

Rai paced, and I could see it in him; I knew that he wanted that moving point, so far away and elusive, to be a man. He wanted to believe they had finally come to him, that he was not there for nothing, wasting his time among women and civilians in the abstract name of duty.

“I should have a rifle,” he muttered, stroking his mustache.

“There are things we must do today,” he added, after a moment. “We need to take the girl back to the village. I am thinking about what you said. They might believe that this is a camp for reinforcements. For soldiers. It is possible.”