She wriggled on his knee so that the towel knot loosened. She was going to be the sweet death of the poor agronomist when he came back from Kandahar. Better stay put, old friend. Stick to the irrigation ditch, keep the good cold water up to your thighs.
And it wasn't as though he was being unfaithful to the woman back in Moscow.
Not really unfaithful, though the nails worked at him and teased him and the towel fell further, because she wouldn't have an idea, his wife in Moscow, of flying the big bird, Mi-24D, in combat up the long Afghan valleys, over the high Afghan mountains.
Safe enough up there, up in the azure, up in the cloud, the evil waited at ground level.
Only took a lucky hit or a fuel pipe blockage or a stress fracture that Maintenance hadn't caught, and he'd be down into that evil that was the ground. He'd shoot himself, he wouldn't stand about and wait, he'd shoot . . . Shit, and he was with a woman, a woman with hungry breasts and wide hips, a woman into whom he could drive himself and bury himself.
He cleared the food from his throat, he swigged the dregs from the beer bottle. He stood up, he picked Ilya high off the floor and her legs circled his waist so that he could carry her better, and she laughed out loud and he managed a smile, and carried her to the bedroom. For a month he could savour her. A memory for a month. He had no photograph of her, because if he carried it in his flying suit and was killed and his body recovered, then the picture would travel with his watch and his wallet back to Moscow.
If he had left a photograph of her in his quarters in Jalalabad and failed to return from a mission, then the picture with his other possessions would slip into the plastic sack to go to his wife and his son. And that was why when he took her to bed he never closed his eyes, never ever, because if his eyes were open then he would remember her better when he flew over the mountains and valleys, above the convoys, through the rifle fire.
The bed shook and creaked and heaved as the Major made a play at loving the agronomist's wife.
Four days out on the trail from the salient of Parachinar, the group of Hizbi-i-Isllami mujahidin with whom Mia Fiori travelled had stopped at this village for food and sleep.
But she was a nurse so she was taken at once to the house of the mullah, and was shown the wounded. She spoke only a few words of the dialect of the Pathan tribespeople - but enough to communicate the basics of information.
Her destination was the Panjshir valley, eight or nine days and nights march ahead.
The mujahidin who escorted her would allow her to spend this one night caring for the wounded they found in the village. She had little influence over these people. It would have been different if the doctor had travelled with her, but a sudden stomach infection had put the doctor to bed in Peshawar and dictated that she travel alone with the Hizbi-i-Islami. Mia Fiori had work that had to be done in the Panjshir and she had determined to make the journey. In this village, through the hours of darkness, she could accomplish her best at cleaning and cauterising the wounds, she could feed into these wracked bodies a little of the morphine that she carried in her back pack, and then when the dawn came she must walk away from them to the next village.
There had been fourteen in the group, she was told. Eight were dead already. Five more lay on the makeshift bedding that had been spread across the swept concrete floor of the mullah's house. A boy cowered in the black shadow against a windowless wall of dry stone, hunched in a blanket, protecting something hidden. Already there was the stink of infection from the opened bowel wounds, from the embedded shrapnel, from the protruding bone splinters. She was not a surgeon, she was a nurse. She did not have the skills of surgery, nor the equipment.
On her knees she moved amongst the wounded five, dabbing with lint cloth. When she looked up and into the faces of the watching tribesmen she was met with only cold stares. As if they read her despair and wondered why she bothered. Death in the jihad was martyrdom, why then prolong a hopeless life? To win them a little comfort, she exhausted that small stock of morphine.
She had long hair, dark and curled in ringlets and falling over her ears. She had deep wind-tanned cheeks. She had the strong nose of a fighter, and the chin of a combatant.
Something of the hawk in her face, something too of the lion. A small bosom that would go unnoticed under a grey cheesecloth blouse. Long and rangy legs, loose moving in the full skirt that when she stood would cover her ankles. Grey socks rolled low on her ankles and heavy duty walking sandals.
Mia was not concerned about her appearance. The passing of the first bloom of her youth was a matter of supreme indifference to her. Appearance had not helped her as a teenager living in the tower flats of Rome's Via Nomentana, nor when she trained in nursing at the Policlinico, nor when she married the club-foot French medical student who was misshapen and whom she loved, nor when he had qualified and they married and he had piled their old Renault into an unlit parked lorry, nor when she had buried him. Appearance was an irrelevance when she had taken a job as a ward nurse in a public hospital close to St Germain. On a bright spring morning, without a comb in her hair and without cosmetics on her face, she had walked into the back street office at Aide Medicale Internationale and said matter-of- factly that she had her summer leave to fill. She had spent the previous summer with a doctor and another nurse in the Panjshir. She had spent the long Paris winter fretting again for her leave and the chance to return. A long winter of dreaming of a sort of homecoming, and on the floor of the mullah's house was the reality of the homecoming.
She stood up, and shrugged. The men gazed back at her without emotion.
Of course she knew of the jihad. All last summer the creed of the holy war and sacrifice had been belted into her by the fighters. Mia was a survivor. She sighed, and cleaned her hands on a cloth. The kerosene threw waving shadows through the room, flickered in the eyes of the men, flashed on their teeth. There were the soft, patient sob groans of the wounded for whom she knew there was no hope. She saw the boy in the corner, against the far wall from the doorway. He was wrapped in a blanket of fine bright colours and his knees made a tent of the blanket and were drawn up against his chest, and he shivered in shock, and there was dark congealed blood on his forehead.
She came close to him, knelt in front of him, seemed to shield him from the scene of dying men.
'Parla I'italiano . . . I'inglese?'
'English, I speak English'. A little whispered voice.
'I can speak in English. My name is Mia. What is your name?'
'I am Gul Bahdur.'
'You were with these men?' She gestured behind her. 'How long ago?'
'Four days ago, the helicopters came ... I have to go back to Peshawar.'
'When you are ready you can go back. First you must rest.'
'I have to go back to Peshawar.' The boy was crying. He struggled against the tears and failed.
'When you are ready.'
Mia wiped at the tears on the soft brown cheeks of the boy. She held his chin in her hand to steady the trembling and peered at the head wound.
'It is nothing,' the boy said.
'It is your only wound?'
it is nothing, I am here to wait for my companions to come with me.'
She felt the boy draw back from her as she dabbed at the wound. She looked into his eyes, into his youth.
'Why do you have to go back to Peshawar, Gul Bahdur?'
'I have to.'
Mia pulled back the blanket, catching the boy by surprise. She saw the Redeye missile launcher, the light of the kerosene lamp winked on the wires of the sighting. It was something she had not seen before. She dropped the blanket, concealed it.
'You have to take that back?'
The boy did not reply.
She reached into her back pack, took out a bandage and wrapped it fast and tight on the boy's forehead. His eyes glowed beneath the white of the bandage, his hair peeped above the binding. She knotted the ties, then stood up. She went back towards the five men on the floor, looked down on them,
shrugged again. The gesture was understood, and the despair in her face.
Only in the Panjshir were the nurses and doctors who came from Paris accorded a genuine welcome. In the Panjshir the resistance had achieved a liberated zone. In that valley the doctors and nurses were honoured.
Away in the high desert lands of the Hazaras a French doctor had been forced to quit when the village people he sought to help would not feed him because their mullah had branded him an unbeliever. But whether they were welcomed, or whether they were shunned, the small medical teams with their trifling supplies of French-donated drugs and antiseptics, lived and worked in the knowledge that their efforts were pitifully small.
And there were dangers. After the principal guerrilla commanders, the Soviets put the doctors and nurses on the top of the list for death or capture. Eight years in a Kabul gaol had been the sentence handed down to a young French doctor trapped in a surrounded village. Perhaps they all felt a sense of adventure, the doctors and the nurses, when they went to the offices of AMI to offer their services. But the spirit of adventure died fast inside Afghanistan. The first sight of a foot blown away by a butterfly anti-personnel, the first sight of a body disembowelled by the rocket's splinters, the first sight of the lemon-sized exit wound of a high explosive bullet, all of those extinguished the spirit of adventure. And for Mia Fiori it was a daily sorrow when she must move on, away from men that she could not help.
She had nursed in tragic, miserable public wards in Paris, and she had learned to hide her feelings well. Harder here, bitterly hard.
An hour later Mia left the village, a tall and long-striding figure in the middle of the column of weapon-laden men of the Hizbi-i-Islami mujahidin, and was swallowed in the pale dusk light.
The sun cascaded in gold over far mountains to the west as the helicopter wound along the thread of the Kabul river.
They flew high, more than a thousand metres, safe from ground level small arms fire.
Medev had waited nearly two hours at the officers' transportation shed at the military side of Kabul's airport before the helicopter was ready to fly. He was in lacklustre humour, always the same when he was leaving Ilya, going back to Jalalabad.
He could smell the scent of her body on his skin, he thought he could feel the taste again of her tongue in his mouth. A Colonel sat beside him in the hold of the Mi-4 troop carrier, beneath the pilot's cockpit. Behind the Colonel and Medev sat six conscripts of Mechanised Infantry. The Colonel offered Medev a slug of vodka from a hip flask. The conversation was desultory above the engine noise. Soon after take off, the sun slipped from sight. It was a journey of an hour, going fast enough as Medev brooded on the agronomist's wife and five more weeks to be served in Afghanistan. One more visit to Kabul. One more afternoon with Ilya. Then the long flight on the Aeroflot back to Moscow, and Medev's back turned once and for all on this shitty place. Everyone believed in their own war, didn't they? It wasn't said out loud, but he supposed the Americans must have believed in their Vietnam. And the British in the South Atlantic, they would have believed in their war, although that was the reimposition of the colonialist regime. And the Israelis in the Lebanon. Medev believed in the war of Afghanistan, just wished most of the time that another bugger was there to fight it for him.
And he thought they were winning. Bloody slow, but they were winning. He had studied Vietnam. Sometimes he thought of the awfulness of fighting a war, Vietnam or Afghanistan, when you knew you were not winning. At least they were winning in Afghanistan. The helicopters were decisive, his helicopters, his Mi-24s.
'You're in helicopters?'
'I have a squadron of gunships, two flights,' Medev replied.
'Do they use them for Intelligence?' The Colonel grinned.
'We fly free fire reconnaissance.'
'No . . . no . . . Intelligence had a trick in Herat where I was before, using the helicopters.'
'We can be given assignments by Intelligence, if there is something particular.'
The Colonel looked at Medev as if unsure whether the Major beside him was play-acting dumb or merely stupid.
'Herat is difficult, close to the Iran border, they have the Khomeini disease there. It takes a rare power of persuasion to make the bandits talk under interrogation. Anything normal and they spit in your face. There was a helicopter squadron in Herat that co-operated in a most successful scheme for Intelligence.'
'What did they manage in Herat?' Medev felt the slow descent towards the Jalalabad navigation lights.
'They'd get hold of three of the bastards and put them in the back of a gunship and fly them up to a thousand metres. They'd throw the first one out, no questions, throw him out and let the others hear his squeal as he went out through the hatch. Sometimes the second isn't too sure if it's for real, if he has a doubt, he goes. The third always talks, that's what we found in Herat.'
Medev coughed. The vomit had risen in his throat. He swallowed hard, and wiped saliva from his lips with the sleeve of his tunic.
'I don't think we've tried that in Jalalabad.'
The helicopter landed, bounced on its four wheels, settled.
He heard the whine dissolve as the engines were cut. He undipped his seat harness, waited for the door to be opened.
He saw the perimeter lights of the Jalalabad airbase, and under the lights were the hoops of close coiled barbed wire.
The squadron's Adjutant, Captain Rostov, met him on the tarmac.
The Colonel had an entourage waiting, salutes and clicking boot heels. Medev had Rostov. A fat little creep. Not a flier, wouldn't know how to turn the engine, but good with the paperwork.
Medev shouldered his overnight grip and walked briskly past the Colonel's party.
Away to his right, inside sand bag revetments was the line of Mi-24 helicopters that he commanded. Ahead of him were the lights of the Administration building of his squadron and the living quarters of his crews. Rostov followed, scurrying to keep up.
'What's happened?'
'Since you've been away?' Rostov sniggered. 'Hasn't been quiet.'
Medev punched the Captain's arm, punched it hard.
'You want the scandal first? Two Mig-25s came in this morning, testing the runway length or something, ground crew got at them. They have alcohol in the coolant and braking system of the Twenty-Five. Ground crew were caught draining off the alcohol
. . .'
'I don't believe it.' A gasp of astonishment from Medev.
'Truly, draining off the alcohol, one was already pissed, three in the MilPol cells.
That's the scandal . . . The flight's back from Gardez. . . Alexei took it down you remember for a week, they're back and boasting their bloody tongues off. They hit a group four days ago, and they broke up an ambush this morning but the other lorries made it through, they reckon they really crapped on the ambush. Funny thing I heard about the hit four days ago, they reckon a rocket was fired at them . . .'
Medev had been listening quietly, happy to let Rostov chatter as they made their way to Administration. Now he turned his head sharply.
'What did he see?'
'If he'd seen anything he might have known what it was. Middle of the day, saw some movement, he was last in the flight, flash on the ground and didn't see what was fired, only the flash. Nothing hit him. He reckoned it was an RPG-7, that was the best he could do. Desperate, aren't they, if they're firing anti-tank rockets at helicopters?'
Medev knew the RPG-7. Effective range against a tank was 300 metres maximum.
No guidance system, wasted against a helicopter. 'Couldn't be anything else.'
'Whatever it was, Alexei got them, blasted the arses off them.'
'He didn't go down?'
'Zapped them and got the hell out.'
'Couldn't be anything else because they don't have missiles.' They parted at Medev's door.
The image of his wife filled his mind, hurting him and blaming him. He never slept well when he came back from Kabul ... in five weeks time he could for
get the whole bastard place.
He looked from the window of his small room. He saw the blazing line of the perimeter's lights and a speeding patrol jeep and a sentry with a dog. He drew the curtains and started to undress. He saw the photograph of his wife and his son.
Five more weeks.
6
Rossiter leaned across the table at lunchtime, a meal of tinned spaghetti hoops and toast, held his chin in his hands and took the deep gulp of breath to prepare himself for a rehearsed speech.
'It's bloody stupid, Barney. It's imbecile, it's not even professional.'
i know that, Mr Rossiter.'
it's the way we go on at home. I don't want to bring my bloody home to Peshawar.'
'I'm sorry, Mr Rossiter.'
Barney had seen the weight drift off Rossiter's face, seen his back straighten in relief.
Barney wondered when he had last apologized to a grown man, he didn't think he could remember. There might have been times when he had used a tactical apology to extricate himself from a difficulty. He doubted if since he had become an adult he had ever apologised with a wide and open face to another man. It was not his way.
'That's big of you, Barney, I appreciate that.' Rossiter kneaded his hands nervously.
'Won't you call me Ross.'
And Barney had smiled, and picked up the plates and gone to the kitchen with them.
Barney had apologised, but Rossiter had first stamped down on the ice. Perhaps the fool who might have chosen the wrong group, who might have waved himself round small-town Peshawar, who lived in a world of white men that was dead thirty years ago, perhaps Rossiter was the brave man.
On that morning after the echoing clatter of the woman's heels as she fled over the verandah, had filled the bungalow, Barney had been first to the shower, and when he had dressed he had circumspectly dismantled the wooden packing crate in his bedroom and made a pile of the boards by the window and a heap of the remaining eight Redeye missiles on his bed. The boards he buried low under the woodpile that climbed against the outside kitchen wall ready for the winter. The missiles he laid in a pit dug from the hard ground of the vegetable patch behind the bungalow, and after they were hidden he covered the newly turned earth with the spread of tomato and pumpkin fronds that he had uprooted.
(1984) In Honour Bound Page 7