by Frank Huyler
“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 painstaking, 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.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Homa sat alone on her cot in the medical tent. She looked up at us. A plastic bag containing what little clothing she had lay beside her on the cot.
“Homa,” Elise said, kneeling beside the girl, turning to Rai as she did so.
“Does she know she is going home?” Elise asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “I have told her. But nothing else, of course.”
Just then, the girl spoke, looking at Rai. Rai grimaced.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“She wants to know if she has done something wrong,” he said, looking at me.
“No,” Elise said, turning back to her and stroking her hair. “Tell her.”
Rai spoke a few words.
“Tell her it is a happy day,” Elise said. “That she is almost better and is going back to her family and soon she will have a new leg.”
The girl listened solemnly as Rai translated, and then Elise began to cry a little. Elise composed herself after only a few seconds, but her tears clearly upset the girl, and she spoke again with urgency. Rai answered her gently.
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��What did she say?” I asked again.
Rai sighed.
“She does not want to leave,” he said. “She is afraid.”
“What is she afraid of?” Elise asked. It was hard for Elise, I could see it—I knew that she wanted to offer the girl endless assistance, to offer her a new life entirely, had such a promise been hers to offer or to keep—I will save you from your fears. I will take you away from here. But of course it was impossible, and all of us knew it.
“She is afraid that she will not be able to gather wood and collect water from the river.”
“Tell her,” I said, “that soon she will have a new leg and that she will be able to do everything she did before, only a bit slower.”
Rai gave me a questioning look, but then he did as I requested. The girl listened intently, then spoke softly to her brother. Her brother bent down to hear her, then spoke to Captain Rai, his off-colored eyes cool and foreign.
“She wants to know if she will need another operation to put it on again,” Rai said.
I shook my head, and did my best to explain—her new leg would be like a stick, and it would not hurt to put it on again.
“She is afraid her mother won’t take her back if she cannot work,” Rai said. It was the sort of thought that came to adults when there was no one in the world to help them. It revealed a great deal about her life in that place, where a field of new barley was a latrine, and apricots drying on rooftops were full of tiny white worms that died off slowly in the sun.
Rai spoke again, firmly. Not without kindness, but leaving no doubt—the tone of authority, the tone of the world as it is. The girl looked down, but she did not, like Elise, shed any tears. She simply went somewhere else, as if dissolving before us, from presence to absence.
“What did you tell her?” I asked, grimly.
“I said that I will make her mother take her back.”
Elise embraced the girl then—she hugged her tight, and stroked her hair again, and kissed her forehead. But the girl did not respond.
“Tell her good-bye,” Elise said, finally, wiping a few tears from her eyes. “Tell her I will visit her.”
Rai did as he was told.
“I do not think I can go with you,” Elise said. “I think maybe it is too much.”
Rai looked relieved.
Later, after Elise had retreated to her own tent, we gathered for the journey back to the village. I’d imagined this for some time, in spite of myself—the triumphant return, the thanks I might receive, the beaming girl released again into the arms of her family. But of course it was nothing like that—it was only Rai, carrying nothing, and Homa, on her brother’s back.
I had a bag of dressing supplies in my pack, which I planned to show her mother how to use. I doubted whether she would ever do as I instructed, and in all likelihood the dressing would not be changed unless I returned to do it myself. But the wound was almost completely healed, with only a bit of scab along the suture lines, and was as good as done.
So we started, in silence, and without ceremony, down the path. It was hard to escape the feeling of being watched, of being terribly exposed beneath the heights, little figures that we were, standing so far out in the open. I knew it was unlikely, even if that moving point I’d seen, so small and far away, had been real. As time passed, I was less and less certain of this. But Rai did not allow himself to doubt. He’d changed possibility to certainty, just as I did the opposite. I suspected then that I would never know, that we would never discover where the truth lay, out there in all that blue sky and clouds and the immensity of the sheer ridges, so full of the inanimate, so full of boulders and patches of snow and silvery threads of water down couloirs never touched by any human thing. But the possibility alone of those dark eyes upon us made me feel uneasy and restless and afraid. It tapped into something, and filled me with a child’s urge to hide, to creep out of sight, though there was nowhere to go.
Rai set a rapid pace, giving no thought to Homa’s brother or, for that matter, to me. I struggled to keep up with him, and nearly asked him to slow down. Rai wanted it over and done with, that was clear.
Down we went, winding along the river. The river had receded since the snow had melted, but it was loud enough to make conversation difficult. But no one spoke, and Rai plunged ahead. I followed, breathing hard even as the trail descended and the village came into view once again. Homa’s brother, however, made no effort to keep up with us, and began to fall behind. Rai realized this after a few minutes, although I said nothing to him, and slowed his pace, no doubt because he did not want to enter the village alone. He would have been required to wait, standing by the houses, the single object of attention. He was uneasy there—in most ways the village was as foreign to him as it was to me. But I could see the effort that slowing down required.
The mile passed quickly, the river went quiet at the wide bend by the village, and the path widened beneath our feet. This time, we arrived unnoticed, and were nearly to the edge of the village before the children saw us.
Rai had none of it. Two or three of them converged around me as before, pulling at my pack, but Rai’s shout was like a shot into the air—they instantly went quiet, and fell back to a safe staring distance. By then, they had also seen Homa, and her brother. And so they followed, watching us, calling out, their thin voices like birdcalls in the air. Figures began appearing in the doorways, and then the men themselves emerged, joining the growing crowd. When we reached Homa’s house, perhaps we had an audience of a dozen men and boys, but then, as the news spread, the entire village began to gather around us once again.
One of the children banged excitedly on the door, and I heard a woman’s voice answering, but it was several minutes before the door opened and Homa’s mother stepped warily into the alley. The cold stream down the center of the street had fallen to little more than a trickle, but still the sound of running water lent the scene an illusion of good cheer.
Homa said something then to her brother, who had stood silently with her on his back. He straightened, allowing her to slide lightly to the ground. Then he took her arm.
Homa, I realized, must have given thought to her return. She hopped toward her mother, doing it as well as she could. The crowd at our backs began to murmur, and her mother watched, making no move toward the girl. For the first time, I saw a resemblance between them—the same lightness of build, the dark eyes, the black hair that appeared in wisps from the edges of her red scarf. For an instant I could imagine the woman as a small girl, looking very much like her daughter. And now Homa hopped across the distance between them, the rough-handed hardship of years, toward her mother’s scoured impassive face.
In some ways, I think it was as terrible a scene as I have ever witnessed. The crowd, the sound of her foot on the dirt, the girl’s determination, and her mother, standing there, eyes narrowed, watching it all. It only lasted a few seconds, but it was enough, and for the first time I wondered whether I had done the right thing.
The woman took a step forward then, and bent down, and lifted the hem of her daughter’s long dress, exposing the stump with its white cap of gauze. There was another murmur in the crowd, and jostling, as they strained to look, and then she turned to Rai and spoke, hoarsely. Homa stood there, enduring her mother’s fingers on her dress just as she had endured everything else.
Rai answered her, matching her harshness with his own.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“She says so it is true that we have taken her daughter’s leg.”
“Does she understand that she would be dead otherwise?”
I heard the anger in my voice.
“That is what I have told her,” he said. “But I do not think she understands.”
“Tell her the foot was no good. That it was not possible to save it. So I saved her daughter instead.”
Rai did as I asked. The woman listened, but then made an unmistakably dismissive gesture and began, suddenly, to shout at Rai. He tolerated it for a fe
w seconds, but then he lifted his hand, and stepped forward, and shouted back a single word. The woman went quiet, and then, to my astonishment, there was a ripple of laughter from the crowd behind me. Rai shook his head in disgust, and turned to me.
“She says that she has lost her husband and now this. She is saying that now her daughter will never marry and is useless to everyone. She is saying that God has punished her.”
“Tell her,” I said, grimly, “that I’ll give her some money.”
Rai looked at me with surprise, but then he turned and spoke again.
His words had a dramatic effect. The woman opened her mouth, then paused, as if she did not know what to say, and in an instant her demeanor changed entirely.
“How much will you give?” Rai asked, looking at me, suddenly distant, with a hint of something else—suspicion, or wariness.
“I don’t know,” I said. “How much should I give?”
He looked away, thinking.
“Fifty pounds,” he said, after a while. “That is enough.”
“Tell that woman I will give her five hundred pounds,” I said. “But tell her that we’ll return in a year and if Homa is not here or if she has not been taken care of I will give her nothing else. But if Homa is in good shape and is well cared for I will give her another five hundred pounds. Tell her that I will do this each year until Homa is twenty-one years old. Tell her also that Homa is to receive a new leg and I will arrange that also. But if at any time Homa is not here or if I feel she is being mistreated she will receive nothing from me ever again.”
As I spoke I realized it was an impossible promise.
Rai shook his head.
“It is too much,” he said.
“It’s nothing,” I replied.
He shook his head again, with irritation.
“Maybe it is nothing for a rich man like you. But for her it is too much. She will have more than anyone in this village and much more than she needs. That will cause many problems. You do not understand this place, Doctor.”
I thought.
“All right,” I said, finally. “But it must be enough that the girl is valuable to her. It must be enough that she can’t afford to mistreat her or cast her out.”