Читать книгу Charlie Johnson in the Flames - Michael Ignatieff - Страница 7

Charlie was on the bed in the Esplanade, propped up on the pillows, wrapped in a towel. Etta was beside him. Her skin was damp from the shower and smelt of a face cream he didn’t recognise. ‘What is this stuff?’ he said, reaching up with his bandaged hand to touch her cheek. ‘Can’t remember,’ she said. She was in a hotel dressing gown and she had pulled up the pillows behind her. It was well after midnight. He had been talking from almost the moment she arrived. She said, ‘Go on.’

Benny had driven the Jeep to the edge of the plateau where the long ravine down into the valley began. It was two in the morning, they had given the competition the slip, and if they did this right, they would be back in the bar for breakfast, with the other crews none the wiser. They left everything they could – lights, batteries, extra tape and medical kit – in the Jeep. The path, about fifty yards from where they parked, dropped steeply and they went down single file, listening to each other’s breathing and the sound of their boots on the stones. They couldn’t use any light, so they stumbled and grabbed for the low branches and swore. Yes, he had been scared and depressed as well.

‘Why depressed?’ she asked, reaching over to the cigarette pack on the night table. She didn’t smoke, but he did when he felt like this, and she lit it for him and put it between his lips and then took it away.

Before the war began, when the border was patrolled by the international monitors, he told her, Charlie had seen pictures of one of the rebel incursion units that had walked into trouble, when they were infiltrating down into the valley. Some cold-eyed guy from the internationals’ forensic unit had taken Polaroid after Polaroid up close. Charlie had run through twenty-eight of the pictures, including one of a woman, good-looking in her camouflage, with brown hair and a shocked expression, as well she might have, since she had walked right into the ambush and would not have seen anything except some muzzle flash in pitch blackness before she felt her life fly out of her chest like a bird.

So yes he was scared, and when he got scared, he got depressed. It was adolescent to court danger at his age. Danger had to have some necessity to it and there was no real necessity here. They were crossing the border, in the middle of a war, going down into the valley, just to file some tape showing that the border villages weren’t held by the other side, as they claimed, but by Benny’s people. It was a ‘good story’.

‘Good stories pay for my house,’ was Jacek’s line. The prince of cameramen, melancholy, withdrawn, with the loping gait of a hunter, and stringy blond hair like a dog’s ears that came down to meet the collar of that battered brown leather jacket. Charlie blinked: he knew he was not functioning properly if the thought of Jacek tore him up.

So they were going down the ravine in the dark, on the wrong side of the border, because it was a good story, because all the crews at the refugee camp had been looking for a way to do it and no one finally had the balls to go for it except them. And yes, precisely because they were the oldest crew in the bar, the one with the most miles on the clock, balls had been allowed to decide the question. That was what he was trying to explain to her: from the night in the bar when he and Jacek had drunk too much and Benny had said, ‘You don’t believe me, I’ll take you,’ well you had to go.

‘Why?’ she said.

‘Santini was in the bar too.’

‘So?’

Her scepticism was unanswerable. Santini’s presence should not have made a difference. But it had. It was a case of animal dislike – of Santini’s custom-tailored safari jacket, his enraging neatness, and yes, let’s admit it now, his youth – making you do stupid things. Fear of being thought ridiculous was a major reason why men did ridiculous things. Charlie knew this and nonetheless had done something that had been a lot more than ridiculous. ‘You figure it out,’ he said. She said nothing, which was good, since he wasn’t in a mood to be told what a fool he had been.

He put some blame for it on the American Bar. An absurd name for an absurd place. It stood a half-mile from the refugees’ tents and the stand-pipes and the women pulling up their trousers after a trip to the slit trench. The bar was down a stinking alley, and it had an improbable garden, someone’s idea of an oasis, laid down in crazy-paving, which they kept hosing down, and a little fountain, and heavy pine trees all around it shielding it from the squalor of the town. Strewn around the garden on those white chairs were the same foreign news crews night after night, drinking poison and not even pretending to know what they were waiting for. All the refugee stories, the heart-warming, heart-rending stuff had been done and they couldn’t cover the war because the war was all but invisible. You could hear the Nighthawks, and sometimes you could see the detonations and once or twice a week they’d be close enough to shake the ground, but otherwise Charlie thought he might as well be back at the bureau watching it on the monitors.

The guy they called Benny hung around the bar, fixing for the crews. It wasn’t his real name and he thought it was beneath his dignity, but everybody called him that. He had been a waiter in Dortmund and Charlie’s first instinct was that he was useless. He was always uncomfortable, boasting, trying to pretend he was a player. Jacek thought that he wasn’t useless, just someone who couldn’t bear to admit that he would rather be in Dortmund, where nothing happened, than here, where his so-called people were fighting for their so-called freedom. ‘He is embarrassed to be afraid’ was Jacek’s considered opinion and this meant that Benny was to be trusted simply because his failings were visible, ‘like the rest of us’, Jacek added, letting this Polish Catholic thought trail upwards into the pall of smoke which stayed trapped by the pines around the crazy-paved haven of the American Bar.

Benny had established his credibility with the fighters by smuggling in a couple of Uzis from Germany. He talked about his homeland down in the valley, but really, if he had been honest, home was in Dortmund. His German was perfect, and when he had drunk some, he told them about his German woman and their Kinder, the municipal Schwimmbad at the end of his street, and the good money he was going to make when he could open a place of his own. Or some such thing. They were drinking after all, and Charlie couldn’t remember all the nonsense they said, although now it seemed to matter, since it was in that bar that the decision was taken. After a week of Benny talking and not delivering, he came back one night whispering that the brigade commander had ‘authorised’ him to lead them down to ‘the command post’, four miles down the track at the edge of the first village in the valley.

‘God almighty,’ Charlie said, and Etta took the cigarette from his lips and stubbed it out.

Charlie lay beside her, so close he could hear the intimate sounds her body made, the soft rise and fall of her breath. It was all very comforting and yet unsettling, since Charlie had taken a chance on her and they hadn’t ever been like this, and they should have been exploring each other’s every pore instead of lying side by side, presuming an intimacy that wasn’t there at all.

He’d just phoned her. Like that. It was one more thing he’d done that didn’t make sense, but which seemed logical at the time. What made him go through with it was that she didn’t sound surprised. She hadn’t said Why me? Why there? Are you sure? She’d just said, I heard. Are you all right? And he had said, Why? Do I sound funny? You do, she said and he had admitted that he was not quite right.

She’d flown from London to be there. That was something. He was grateful when she showed up in the lobby. When he said so, she replied, ‘I don’t like grateful. Makes me feel like Mother Teresa.’

‘Is glad better?’

She kissed him in the elevator gently on his lips. It was the first time she had ever kissed him. She didn’t say anything about the bandages on his hands.

He had stayed in the hotel about half a dozen times, and after his night in the Navy hospital it was where he wanted to be. It had Third Reich corridors, curving, carpeted, high-ceilinged and dim. There was some story about it being a German HQ during the Second World War. So it had shameful glamour in its past and the staff pretended they remembered him, and that was all Charlie wanted in a hotel.

‘What are we doing?’ Charlie suddenly asked her.

‘We’re just talking, Charlie,’ she said. Charlie thought that sounded all right. It struck him, while he lay there, that he knew so little about her, except that she was from that border region where Ukraine, Hungary and Slovakia met and where there were, or used to be, Jews and Slovaks and Hungarians and Ukrainians all mixed together. That was what she said, leaving you to figure out which one she was. There was the accent, and the smell of her face cream, and the close-fitting cut of her suits, but nothing about her had ever come sharply into focus until that moment when he had checked himself in and reached for the phone, knowing that she was the one he had to call. She hadn’t asked the obvious questions like why he hadn’t gone home to Elizabeth. Her willingness to let obvious questions go had been impressive. Frankly, he just hoped that she would keep listening and not care whether this had any future. He didn’t want to rejoin his life. He hoped his life would stay on the other side of the rain that kept falling in the hotel courtyard and that it would keep raining, and that they could keep hearing it through the white curtains which rose and fell in the breeze.

‘Go on,’ she said.

It had taken two hours in the dark to get down to the bottom of the valley. They broke the cover of the trees, where the path gave out on a dust-covered road that ran through the length of the village. There were maybe fifteen houses, although he couldn’t see them all because of the bend in the road. They climbed over some low stone fences and then ducked under a clothes-line. By the wall of the first house they stood stock-still, waiting for the sound of their own footfalls to settle, listening to the animals shifting in the straw behind the wooden staves of a barn. In an upstairs window, there was a flicker of someone moving, as if they had been seen. A quarter-moon scudded in and out behind dirty clouds. They heard the Prowlers and F16s above them and they hoped their thunder covered their sounds. Jacek was loping along, keeping low. They hadn’t blackened their faces – it wasn’t smart to pretend to be a combatant – so they shone like lanterns whenever the moon came out from behind the clouds.

Benny was lost and was trying to pretend he wasn’t; straight down the lane, in plain sight. The rebel command post they were supposed to be heading for was nowhere to be seen and the lane was petering out, and they were losing the time they needed to get back up to the plateau before the first patrols.

At the last house in the village – just before the woods closed in again – Benny stopped and they all stepped into the shadow by the barn wall and he tapped on the door. Unbelievably, he seemed to be asking for directions.

That had been the basic mistake, Charlie thought, to have drawn them in, those two people whose names he never knew, to have drawn them into all the consequences. It need not have happened.

But you didn’t have time to think because Benny was beckoning through the open door and they blundered into the room, heavy figures taking up too much space, making too much noise. There were people there, but you couldn’t see them, and then hands – Benny’s maybe, maybe somebody else’s – were pushing you along a passage and down some stairs. The smell of earth and mould and damp told you it was the cellar. And you stayed there listening to the floorboards creak above your head, and Jacek’s laboured breathing and the thump of your blood.

It was a rootcellar, not high enough to stand straight up in, dirt on the floor, and somewhere in the dark, onions. But they did not move, just stayed there, framed in dawn light from the window, listening to the noises overhead.

Then they went still. No patrols till six had been Benny’s promise, and there it was in the lane, the blue half-track, at ten to five. You heard it before you saw it: a low engine noise, and then through the cobwebbed window, you could see the studded track of its tyres maybe fifteen feet away. You could hear boots stepping down from the half-track, footfall on gravel. So you stood still breathing in the acrid odour of Benny’s sweat in the darkness, watching while Jacek edged his face away from the window light into the shadow, then stood motionless, breathing in and out, praying to the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.

Above you, stillness, not even the sound of weight being shifted from one foot to another. The people upstairs, waiting in the dark.

Incredible mental alertness: you had time to think about whether your footprints were still visible on the dusty track, whether the militia had picked them up. You had time for all the possibilities – Benny has betrayed you, he has not; he will buckle, he will not. All the possibilities run through your mind, except of course what happens.

Charlie got up in his towel, went over to the curtains, pushed them aside and watched the rain for a while. He came back to bed, lay down, leaning against her shoulder. She smiled but he had a bad feeling about it: what was he doing here? Why was he leaning against the shoulder of a woman he didn’t really know?

‘Go on,’ she said and Charlie shook his head.

‘It’s good to talk. But why exactly? Why is it supposed to make any difference at all?’

‘You asked me to come,’ she said.

‘I don’t know why.’

‘I know you don’t. But it doesn’t matter.’

‘Why are we doing this?’

‘Charlie.’ It was the way Jacek used to say it, just to shut him up. It worked this time. Someone had to help him stop these futile gusts of helpless self-recrimination. He came back to himself. He thought: she is all right. Isn’t investing too much in being here, isn’t holding her breath, doesn’t want anything from me.

Would he have flown from London to listen to this? Not without something in return. Like sloshing around in the bath together, like spilling the minibar over each other and licking it off. But there hadn’t been anything like that. In fact, there had been nothing at all. She took a shower. He took a shower. She re-bandaged his hands with the dressings the Navy had given him. She unpacked a small bag and hung a dress in the closet. She tossed his clothes into a hotel laundry bag, rang for service and told them to dispose of them and to send for new ones, same size, in the city. He watched all this with approval. She took charge. He liked that. The weather lifted inside him and he knew all he had to do was lie there with her and talk it out, talk it through until it was no longer weighing upon his chest.

Etta was what he would have called an office friend, though he didn’t know what to call her now. She had been there when he took the job at the bureau, and for a long time he didn’t pay her any attention. She didn’t go out on the road. She was there when he came back. She was Etta the unit manager, famously efficient, famously unapproachable, famously gone at six sharp every evening. She had outlasted four editors, the smart boys, she called them. Charlie’s contempt for management was unruly and professionally suicidal, while hers had a queenly disdain which he came to admire.

He had said to her once that she should be running a small country. She laughed and then said in her dark voice, ‘No, Charlie, it is enough to run you.’ So she stayed: they all got younger, except Charlie and her. He supposed they were about the same age though with women you could never be sure. She was the subject of much speculation, most of it sexual, because of the perfume and a couple of cream outfits that made even soundmen, the most boring train spotters in their business, sit up and sniff the office air like hungry dogs. But because she was Eastern European, and ‘kept to herself’ and was older than most of the crews, nobody had tried anything, or come back to tell about it. She knew everything of course because she processed all the expense claims. What male sordidness was there in those piles of chits: trips to brothels, doctor’s bills for the clap, hard-core services of every description, which they dropped on her desk, followed by comical, bold-facing lying, about why none of it looked as bad as it seemed. Charlie had tried it on a few times himself, but she was never fooled. She listened expressionless and then tossed back two of his claims just to let him know that she was not taken in by his low-rent villainies.

They had become friends, but he couldn’t remember when. Not at first, but slowly over the years. He would sit on the edge of her desk, pass her a cup of coffee from the machine and that was when he got used to talking to her, got used to her kind of listening, which was intent and detached and seemed to know where he was going before he got there. He would tell her about the assignments, and because she’d done the flights and hotels, hired the fixer, she understood. She knew where you could get a decent camera in Peshawar or Luanda or whatever, and had once hired a plane which extricated him from Kigali when nobody was landing there. Her competence back at the fort came to be something he depended on in the field. You could tell your story quickly and she didn’t need a lot of explanation. So a certain complicity had developed. One-sided, he now realised, because he didn’t talk about home and she never ventured the slightest hint about her private life. The one time he took a step into that terrain, asking what she was doing that weekend, she replied, looking up over her glasses, ‘That is none of your business.’ And then she threw him out because she had too much paper, she said. ‘Get out, Charlie. Come back some other time. I’m busy now.’

Then there came the day he returned from the funeral in the States. She stopped him in the corridor to say that he didn’t look so good, and he walked into her office and slumped in the seat in front of her desk. He told her about his dad, a lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers, out of Des Moines, six foot four and a half in his stocking feet, who had liberated the camp, with Mika in it, in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1945. He had taken Mika back to Dedham, Mass., where he turned her into an American and gave her a sense that the world would always be steady under their feet, until the Sunday morning when Mika found him by the work-bench, every spanner, wrench and screwdriver still in its place on the wall, lying on the garage floor, dead of a heart attack at sixty-three. If Charlie thought about it now, Frank’s passing was the beginning of the bad period, for Mika had nestled like a bird in Frank’s arms for forty years. When he was no longer there, she soon ceased to be there either, which was why their son, Charles Johnson, who had gone to war like his father and trusted to his strength as much as she had, sat in Etta’s office and found himself swallowing his tears.

You could explain their being in the hotel together, he thought, by this history of confession, except that you wouldn’t want to exaggerate. Apart from that one time, talking about the death of both of his parents, there hadn’t been all that much confessing.

There was a lot she did not know, like, for example, why he had called her, and not his wife, when the Navy hospital had discharged him. He didn’t either. So that made two of them. They were there in the hotel, waiting until the reason became obvious to both of them, and he would either return to his life or blow it up.

‘You are in the rootcellar, Charlie,’ she said.

The squad didn’t come through the door, not then anyway. The half-track moved on slowly with its treads making a clinking sound like hot coals slipping down in a grate. Nobody moved, not in the cellar, not in the house above. It was like that for hours. They did nothing but sit there, once moving over to the pile of onions to piss, which left them stuck with the smell of their urine and the onions mixing together in the dirt.

A man could die of restlessness. If you believed you had to take charge of all the waiting – that was the way to get yourself wasted. That day he learned from Jacek how to wait: to go into a special Polish Catholic zone of attentive motionlessness, waiting for the sun to make its transit of the dirty window, watching the blades of grass flame as the sun went through them.

But the people in the house went out. From the cellar window, Charlie couldn’t see more than an old man and the woman, who must have been his daughter, working in the vegetable patch. The patrol came by twice. If the old man and the woman were hiding the presence of the strangers in their rootcellar, they were doing a terrific job. If they were about to betray them, they were also doing a terrific job. Charlie had no idea what was going to happen.

The light was fading, and the cover of a possible escape was coming up rapidly when Benny flicked on the radio and whispered his call sign. Jacek leaned his head against the cellar wall and closed his eyes. ‘Idiot,’ he whispered. Exactly. As if the patrols weren’t monitoring every band. Then there was a scratchy reply, low but distinct. So now they had to move, because the patrols would be back, zeroing in on where Benny’s signal came from.

Benny went first, beckoning them up from the cellar and giving them the run sign, and they hurtled down the short passage to the light, clearing the village track and blundering into the trees the other side. When they reached the woods, Charlie turned and looked back: there were eyes watching him from the window of the house.

‘We shouldn’t have left them.’

‘It happened too fast,’ she said.

She was not there to pronounce absolution. But then it occurred to him it wasn’t she who was interested in absolution. It was him.

Benny hadn’t been that wrong, just five hundred yards wrong, and they found the rebel command post on the first ridge among the pines, within sight of the house. Except that ‘command post’ was ridiculous for just a dug-out so well hidden that it might have been a trap for animals. There were three of them, village boys, absurdly young and not exactly inspiring confidence, but they had face camouflage which made them look like semi-serious killers and in the forest gloom Charlie could see RPGs, Zastavas and some armour-piercing shells on a clip. Jacek was happy because he could turn over and Charlie did a breathless stand-up, in the dug-out, trying to project enough sound volume to get picked up on the camera mike, but not enough to get them caught, with the red-rimmed eyes of the fighters just visible at the rear of the shot. Looks real, Jacek said, after he had checked the gate, except that Charlie knew it wasn’t especially real. The camera always had a way of flattening things out, leaching the danger out of any moment. Danger or not, it was a good career move. Charlie had a report proving that the guerrillas were still active in villages within four miles of the border. And the twenty-somethings were still dozing in the American Bar. Now all they had to do was get it up the hillside when the darkness came, reach the sat phone in the Jeep and beam it back.

‘So Shandler could pass you in the hall and give you his significant nod,’ Etta said.

‘Fuck Shandler. And his significant nod,’ Charlie said.

He slowly slipped down so that he was lying with his head in her lap. She did not play with his hair; she did not stroke his chin or rub her hand along his eyebrows. She let him use her lap: that was all. And she would stick a cigarette between his lips from time to time. His palms hurt and when he went to scratch them against each other, she stopped him. ‘You were lucky,’ the surgeon said. ‘All you needed to lose was another fraction of an inch, and you’d have been in trouble.’ A half-second more. The terrifying unworthiness of good luck.

Etta asked if he had seen Jacek’s footage, but he shook his head. There was a television in the room, but he didn’t even want to watch the competition. Santini was probably down there right now. The blood would draw the flies.

They thought it was going to be all right, the three of them sitting there in the dug-out with the village boys, waiting for another half-hour more of darkness to cover their escape back up the track to safety. It was amazing to him now, this foolish hopefulness. After almost thirty years in the business, how many times had he been shot at? How many times had he and Jacek put their noses above some wall and made a calculation: Do we run? Do we stay? Which way is the story moving? How far to that wall over there? Everything turned on decisions like that. It was not addictive. That was what people said, who didn’t know anything about it. Addiction was not what it felt like, because it didn’t feel crazy or out of control. It was about the conviction that a certain kind of experience gave you, or at least what he felt when he and Jacek were assessing the same risk. They just knew. If there was any intoxication in what they did, it was this knowledge, the accumulated experience of two old dogs who had done all their hunting together. Jacek looked the part: the gait, the long nose, the watchfulness, the way he cocked his head when he listened. But all this self-confident knowledge had just evaporated. From now on Charlie wasn’t sure of anything. His hands weren’t shaking. But they would. He had picked up a tremor, he was sure of it. All the old bastards got it sooner or later. Now it was his turn.

They started out from the dug-out just as the sun set. It was two hours back to the top, more or less, but they only went a hundred yards before they had to take cover. The firing started and they thought it was aimed at them. You always do. But it wasn’t. Nothing was coming through the trees. They were perfectly safe. It was down in the village.

The half-tracks, four of them, had returned and the squads were smashing down the doors, pulling the men out into the road, while others were tossing lighted brands inside. Jacek and Charlie watched from the trees while the lead half-track clanked to a stop in front of the house where they had been hidden. The turret swivelled, the gun moving back and forward across the whitewashed stones, the red tiled roof, the garden on the side where the woman and her father had been putting in a spring planting, even tying up an aluminum pie tin on a pole to scare away the birds.

The three of them, in blue-black body armour, went through the front door, and five hundred yards away in the cover of the pines, you could hear the sound of wood being smashed, glass splintering and a scream, muffled through the walls, but so distinct, so piercing, so lonely. You had your face in the dirt and your hands over your ears.

When Charlie looked up, a fourth one in body armour was out of the half-track carrying the jerry-can to the door.

The village boys in the dug-out could have started shooting, but it would have drawn fire, and they were no match for the half-tracks. So they just sat there, as stunned as Charlie and Jacek. She was out in the road by then, running towards the commander, shouting.

Charlie was pacing the hotel room now, and the towel had slipped off his waist. He was naked but for the bandages on his hand, not caring about being ridiculous, he was back there, really back there, with the story inside him needing to be pulled out, like some infected splinter. She watched from the bed.

One member of the squad with a jerry-can was sloshing down the door-frames and windows, the garden fence, the plants, the grassy path to the door. She was screaming at the commander, fists raised, when the gasoline arced over her and the lighter touched her hem. She went up with her house, an orange-black spinnaker of flame catching the wind. Jacek began to turn over, whispering as he stared down the viewfinder, mouthing Polish prayers.

She was running along the road towards them, while the commander watched her go, and stayed the mercy of an executioner’s bullet. Then he climbed into the half-track, reversing hard and turning around to finish the operation.

That was when the torpor of fear ended and you broke cover and stepped into the road. As she ran, her arms were like wings of flame, and she blundered into you in an embrace of fire – and you were both down, in the dusty road, rolling over and over.

They had ten minutes maybe, before the patrol came back. The village boys might cover them, might not. You remembered pulling her off and sitting up, looking at your hands and then at her, legs and lower body intact, but shoulders and upper arms charred and that terrible place across the top of her back. Jacek had his water bottle out and poured it across her shoulders and she cried out.

Only Jacek had instincts you could trust. Benny was shaking, and talking to himself, and Jacek told him to get her up if she could walk, which she could, and get her into the trees. She did not look back at the burning house. Her father was in there, but it was too late.

He remembered Jacek taking Benny by the shoulders and shaking him and saying: we are taking her. When Benny said they couldn’t, Jacek told him to shut up. And then they poured water down her throat and down her back, and she said nothing, and seemed to feel nothing, and fell, and Benny and Jacek picked her up and carried her most of the way, and she astonished them by walking ahead of them, like a possessed spirit, the final mile to the edge of the plateau where, reaching safety, she buckled again. Behind came Charlie stumbling and falling, reaching out to the trees and crying out when his singed hands rasped against the bark. And all along the road, they had one thought: it will be all right if we can get her to the other side. And then it was: it will be all right if we can get her into the chopper. And then it was: it will be all right if we . . .

He was now standing in the middle of the hotel room, looking at his hands. Weak light came through the windows and the sound of rain.

‘What am I doing here?’

He was crying, ignominious and naked, waving his useless hands to and fro, as if he thought this would take the burning away.

‘What am I doing?’

Etta came to him and stood there in front of him. Then she undid her robe and he stepped closer and she folded him in. She said nothing, just held him and he held her with the weight of his wrists against her shoulders and his bandaged palms out a fraction from her body. They stood like that for a long time.