by Mike Bond
But still sometimes the streets and sidewalks of Paris, the shops and cafés, felt unreal. The hours on the telephone made his shoulder ache; the muscles tightened over the ruined bone, and month after month the pain grew.
One night he dreamt he and Husseini were fighting in the gutter outside Sartrouville Mosque. Husseini’s face neared, filthy teeth grinning with exertion; he kissed Jack’s cheek with hairy lips. Jack sat up. Sophie breathing softly beside him was not Husseini.
“What is it?” Her voice shocked him. When you were being kissed by Husseini in the gutter, could you be sure you weren’t imagining this too?
“Can’t sleep.”
“What you did, darling – I know we can’t speak about it, but it will go away. Over time it will go away.”
He stretched out beside her. “Look what you’ve been through.”
“I always feared it was coming. You didn’t. And I’ve got Leo.”
I’ve got the Russian major. And the Russian kid by the APC, the old woman shot by mistake, Hamid from the fedayeen camp in the Beqaa, all the others. These are my children. “I’ve got you,” he said.
She slid against him. “And I’ve got you.”
But you had someone else before. “Why won’t you tell me what happened, with Leo’s father?”
“Why won’t you listen? There’s no reason to talk about it!”
“It’s like you’re hiding something –”
After a moment she faced him. “He was a Russian officer. We were getting married soon as his tour was up. In two months.”
He lay with hands behind his head imagining Leo’s father, thinking of the boy’s oval face, the oriental hint to his dark eyes. “What did he do?”
“What do soldiers always do? Kill each other. We’re not going to discuss it.”
He watched her face. This life, with her, seemed realer now. Could he make the other go away, what had happened to them both in Afghanistan?
He caressed the inside of her forearm, imagined telling her about Sin City, the Hindu Kush, the dead Russians, Beirut, the Beqaa. The brown blood on the Métro walls, Husseini in the Sartrouville Mosque.
He wouldn’t think about all that. And slowly, over time, it would go away. Till his life with her, this regular job at IEA, became what he was.
But who was Leo’s father? Why wouldn’t she tell?
“Afghanistan,” she said. “You were bringing arms to the mujihadeen, weren’t you?”
“I can’t tell you that.” He smelled the disinfectant and severed limbs in the Kabul hospital, felt the agony in his shoulder as he lay on the gurney. He heard her speaking Pashto from another room, “If you move him he’ll die.”
Let it go. But it itched at him, not knowing. “Why didn’t you get married?”
She sighed, got up on one elbow. “The mujihadeen in the eastern Panjshir agreed to peace talks. Leo was the senior Russian official in the convoy. It was a trap. They were all killed.” She said nothing, then, “He was executed. By those assassins.”
Jack looked into the dark core of the universe. “When? When was this?”
“June eighty-three.” She sat up, brushed hair from her face. “Later the mujihadeen said it was retribution for some destroyed villages, but Leo had never destroyed anything. It was Hekmatyar, that American pawn, who’d done that.”
He saw the major’s pained, angry face against the bloody snow. And in the darkness the pale face of the woman he loved. What horrible irony, what maleficent fate, what grinning Devil who ran life, had arranged this?
He got up, stubbed his toe on a bed leg. “All this talk. I’m like the Spartan boy with the fox gnawing his guts.”
“That’s because he’s hiding it.”
“He can’t reveal it. He’s not allowed to have it.” He slipped into his shirt and jeans and sat in the living room.
Shadows lay across the floor like blood. Guns were going off inside his head. He had to tell her. He couldn’t tell her. It would break her heart all over again. But if he didn’t tell her, how, every day, could he face Leo? Face her?
If Husseini hadn’t bombed the Paris Métro, Jack would never have been sent to Paris. If we hadn’t trained Husseini, he never would have bombed it. If we hadn’t decided to bleed the Soviets in Afghanistan, Jack would never have been sent there either, never have been wounded, never known her, never have been responsible for the death of the Russian major.
If Husseini hadn’t fired stupidly on the stepping-stone bridge, Jack wouldn’t have been wounded, she wouldn’t have saved him... If Timothy hadn’t wanted deniability, Jack would never have been sent to Paris, and found her.
If he hadn’t asked they could have lived their lives together and never known.
He didn’t have to tell her. She’d never know, and over the years would forget the Russian major dying in the snow, his last words spat into your face, “Fuck you and your children. May they never have children.”
Payback. You always get it, sooner or later. Whether he told her or not she was gone.
SOPHIE FORCED HERSELF awake. Was it a dream that she and Jack had been talking? No, it had happened, he’d gone into the living room. He’s fine, she decided, nestling down in the warmth, pushing at the pillow to get it just right under her head.
But it was unlike him to be out there so long. So many hidden facets to him. Even though there were parts of him she didn’t understand, all of him was loving and warm, caring without interfering, watching over Leo like his own son.
She’d loved Leo’s father, too, but not the same. The first time making love with him in that little armored car – there’d been passion and impossibility, the way love springs so easily out of war. But this love with Jack was more lasting, built on everyday rhythms between people who can be who they are.
Leo had been coarse and thick-fisted, brilliant, unconventional and purely Slavic. Faithful and kind. Jack was more mercurial, withdrawn one moment and affectionate the next, with you one moment and unreachable the next. Just as there was not an ounce of extra weight on him, as if he’d trimmed his life down to only the essential.
And if they did have children Jack would be a wonderful father. Maybe they would – this had gone on for months now, always growing, always stronger. What if they got married?
She really should make sure he was okay. She slid back the covers.
He was sitting in the darkness looking out the window. She sat on the sofa beside him, cuddled up to him and slipped one hand between his arm and chest. “What is it?”
“Trying to figure things out.” Don’t say it now, he told himself. Maybe later. Just have this last night.
But later when he told her she’d know that he’d known now and hadn’t said.
The corded thickness of his biceps under her hand excited her. He’s so loving and kind, she thought, and that made her want him too. She leaned closer, liking the feel of her breast against his shoulder. He jerked away.
“Whatever’s bothering you,” she said, “we can work it out...”
He took a breath. “Leo’s father –”
“C’mon, honey, I said I didn’t want to talk about it –”
Don’t tell her now, he told himself. “I was there when he died.” He swallowed. “I was with the ones who killed him.”
“What!” she choked, couldn’t speak, jumped back. “What?”
“I didn’t know it was a peace convoy – I didn’t want him killed...” He looked out the window at the darkness.
She hit him on the temple hard with the heel of her hand, sending shock waves of pain up her arm, hit him again, it was like hitting a steel wall, he hardly seemed to notice. “You bastard,” she screamed, “you knew. Bastard!”
“I didn’t know, Sophie. If I had I never would’ve plagued you.”
She hit him again and again until calmly he took her wrists and held them. “I’ve never loved anyone like you. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you –”
“But you did, Oh how you hurt me. Hurt little
Leo, who will never have a father! You Bastard! Why?” She yanked her hands free and slapped his face.
He took her wrists again. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
She sat there, hands stinging, staring down at her knees. “I knew you were poison. Why didn’t I listen?”
He went to the window. “Maybe it had to be like this.”
“I’m taking Leo to my folks and going somewhere, anywhere.”
“I can take care of Leo.”
“You get away from him –”
She bent over weeping; he put his hand on her shoulder. “I didn’t mean to let him die. I didn’t know any of this. Not till tonight.”
She looked up at him, her tear-streaked face glistening in the dim fluorescence through the window. “If you hadn’t kept asking – we never would’ve known –”
She took a breath. “But you had to keep asking! Didn’t you?”
HE TOOK A FURNISHED place in Rue du Passy close to IEA, a fourth floor walkup with three windows on a paved cour where a lone oak bled tan leaves on the cobbles. This is who I am, he told himself. This had to be.
What they taught you in Sin City: Learn to never need what you might lose.
Just like an amputation you get phantom pain. She’s not there anymore but still she hurts you.
Next week he asked for Friday off, and late Thursday took the TGV to Marseille. In the men’s room he changed into an old djellabah and put his other clothes in a locker. With a blanket roll over one shoulder he walked down to the ship terminal and bought a third class ticket to Algiers.
Sahara
THE BOAT LEFT AT MIDNIGHT. The third class passengers slept in huddled masses on the deck, using their arms for pillows. When the wind shifted and spray came on the deck they went to the other side, stepping on each other and arguing in the dark.
Algiers at dawn spread across the hills like a vast gray melanoma. It felt alien to walk the sidewalks jostling the ragged barefoot men, avoiding the women in black robes and veils, to cross the streets jammed with double-parked cars, thunderous buses and stinking trucks. Radios blared the insistent rant of mullahs; the air reeked of garbage, exhaust and sewers. Everyone seemed to notice him.
The bus to Ghardaia gasped up the corniche and over the first ridges of the Jebel Atlas. Streams ran through willow copses, orchards and olive groves. Many villages were bombed or burned. Others were deserted, no sheep or goats in the fields, the grass long and the fruit trees withered.
He slid open the window to let in hot dry wind. When he got back to Paris he’d tell Ricard what he’d done and be finished with it all, go somewhere else. If he got back to Paris.
If he hadn’t told her he wouldn’t be here. He’d see her every day, sleep with her every night. Wake with her naked beside him, hold hands in the market.
Ghardaia was a town of gray cement houses with narrow windows. A seething wind from the south blew red dust and trash in circles. Clothes hung over walls and chickens pecked at camel dung. A few palm trees drooped fronds under a withering sky.
He thought of the battle in the Hindu Kush when Husseini had hid in the rocks firing blindly, of Husseini’s constant nasal remonstrances from the Koran, his unending jibes about the West – “Feeling lonely? Miss your shopping malls, your loose women?”
Husseini grinning when Jack had caught him torturing the Russian prisoner.
He reached Knetra at dusk, the air sere, the earth still hot. Goats bleated and roosters crowed; smoke hung in the street. After dark he skirted the village, flinching at a camel that thundered off. He dozed in a wadi, twice wakened by cobras coiling against him, drawn to his warmth. He sat up the rest of the night but no more snakes came. The sun rose fat and dull ochre above basalt cliffs.
With his cloak wrapped across his face like a Bedouin he walked the streets but did not see Husseini. He sat near the well but that seemed too busy so he picked a shady side street where he could watch the central square and the low, blue-painted mosque.
He watched all day but never saw Husseini, feared he wasn’t there, that he was going to have to ask. Then in late afternoon an old gray Peugeot truck clattered into the square with three men standing in the back holding AKs. In the passenger seat was Husseini.
The truck juddered to a halt in front of the mosque. People gathered round it; others came squinting from their squat little houses.
Husseini climbed up into the back, held up his hands. He wore a dusty djellabah and the same Muslim skullcap with blue and red sequins. In the desert wind it was hard to hear, but Husseini seemed to be exhorting them, pointing at the young men, his own heart, the mosque behind him, the sky.
He talked for a long time. A few young men got in the back of the truck. Husseini fired a salvo and some of the people cheered. He got down and climbed back into the cab and the truck drove off slowly with the young men clinging to the back.
Jack followed the truck tracks up a wadi to the southeast. After about a mile they crossed a dune to three rundown tile-roofed huts inside a yard fenced with thorn branches. The truck and a donkey stood in the courtyard. In the shade of one hut a man walked back and forth holding a book and lecturing the young men who had left town on the back of the truck.
Beyond the courtyard and a line of dead fruit trees was a whitewashed shed that seemed an outhouse. Jack slipped back up the wadi and waited for night.
Sophie would be on her way home now with Leo through the lovely Paris evening. Talking about what to have for dinner.
A half moon cleared the eastern peaks, shadowing the orchard. A veiled woman came from one of the huts, went into the outhouse and left. Another woman came out with three children and made them go in one by one.
Jack felt evil and alone. Maybe Husseini wasn’t going back to France, wouldn’t bomb another subway. Maybe he’d just stay here, be a local celebrity.
Sophie would be reading Leo a story in bed now.
When darkness fell Jack moved from the wadi up behind the outhouse.
A man came out of one of the other huts and went into the outhouse and sat for a long time grunting and talking to himself. He left and one by one the lights in the three huts died. Jack edged closer till he could see into the yard. Beads rattled, and a man in a pale djellabah came toward the outhouse. Moonlight sparkled off the sequins in his cap.
Jack waited till Husseini had gone into the outhouse and shut the door. His heart thundered; his arms trembled. He could not quiet his breath.
The wooden door was hinged on the right. Jack waited in moon shadow behind it. He heard Husseini dip his fingers in a tin of water to wash himself, readjust his djellabah, snuffle and spit into the hole. The door squeaked open. Husseini stepped outside. Jack yanked up his head and drove his knife into his throat.
Husseini grabbed at the knife, twisted away, smashed his elbows backwards into Jack’s ribs, kicked at his shins, gasping and gurgling. He stopped jerking and hung still.
Blood coated Jack’s hands and sleeves, the ground, the front of Husseini’s djellabah. Jack dragged him into the desert, ran back to the outhouse, grabbed up handfuls of bloody sand and threw them in the scrub. With an olive branch he swept the sand clear, walking backwards toward Husseini’s body and brushing away his tracks and the two ruts made by Husseini’s heels.
He circled the village paralleling the Ghardaia road, watching in the moonlight for snakes that had crawled out to enjoy the day’s last heat. A few miles from Knetra he began to run along the road. His sandals kept falling off so he removed them and ran barefoot, the pavement warm under his soles.
He caught the early bus Sunday morning back to Algiers, took the night boat to Marseille, and was in his office by noon on Monday. “Sorry,” he told his boss, a big rumpled ex-Purdue lineman named Anders. “I had the flu or something. Sick as a dog all weekend.”
“It’s been going around,” Anders said.
Lionheart
WHEN SOPHIE WALKED TO HER CAR next week in the hospital parking lot a wiry gray-haired man in
a cheap suit stood against it smoking. She scanned the parking lot but could see no guards. She started to back away.
“Don’t worry, Madame Dassault.” He reached into his coat and held out an ID. “Police Nationale. Colonel Max Ricard. We need to talk.”
“I’ll pay that parking ticket,” she said nervously. “I promise.”
He had a large sunny laugh for such a small man. “That’s not why I’m here, my dear Doctor. Call it personal business on my part – it’s about your American.”
That bastard. What’s he done now? “I don’t have any American!”
“No games.” He tossed his cigarette. “That’s my profession, not yours.”
“You shouldn’t smoke those.”
“I came by to tell you he’s a brave man who’s done great service to France. At the risk of his life.”
“What’s he done?”
He nodded at her car. “No need to drive to work any longer. The Metro’s safe.”
She felt dizzy. He began to walk away, turned back. “Let’s keep this little chat,” he smiled, “between us French?”
THE DOOR BUZZER SNARLED and Jack spun out of his chair grabbing the Makarov and backed against the wall five feet from the door expecting bullets to blast through it. The buzzer buzzed again and after a few seconds her voice said, “It’s me.”
She was skinnier, more angular, her hair cut short. “I don’t want to live without you.”
“I’m living just fine without you.” He swung a hand at the room “Go out every night.” Soon I’ll go somewhere and die. His body melted toward her. “You can’t live with me.”
She reached out making him think of a ladder up the side of a ship and she unable to reach it, drowning in a frozen sea. “You didn’t mean to let him die,” she said. “Just because I loved him doesn’t mean I can’t love you too –”
The Russian major gut-shot in the red snow pointed to his heart. “I have no explanation,” Jack said. “That will ever clear me.”