Charlie Johnson in the Flames. Michael Ignatieff
were poised for take-off, their fantails glowing crimson. He felt the fear ebbing from him with every step he took. He could see the nurses just ahead, in the light of the halogen arcs at the admission bay of the hospital, taking her inside.
He followed her down the low corridors, lit by sloping arches of 40-watt bulbs, conscious now, as he passed the young surgeons in their theatre scrubs and the naval orderlies in their browns, that he was dirty and blood-soaked and unwell. But they stopped him when the gurney was wheeled into the surgery bay, behind two plastic flanges that closed against him. Two medics sat him down, and a nurse poured sweet milky coffee down his throat, which stopped him shaking, and they attended to his hands. They laid him down on a bed and they put him on a drip, and a blonde nurse, with her mouth covered in hospital green, had his hands on her lap, cleaning them with swabs. Everything hurt, and he said so, and she gave him an injection and he felt nothing at all and lay on his back watching night moths slam their heads into the rows of naked bulbs that snaked down the apex of the tent. The heat ventilators were roaring and the tent flaps were billowing, and dust from the moths’ damaged wings filtered through the light and Charlie felt he had made it home and dry. He was lying back with his eyes open, when a young surgeon in scrubs came in. He wanted to know whether he knew her, and Charlie asked, ‘What do you mean?’ and he said that the female civilian was DOA – or shortly thereafter, he corrected himself – and that since he was going to have to process her, he had to know her name.
‘She didn’t have one,’ Charlie said. For the rest of his life he was to wonder why he had ever allowed himself to believe it would end in any other way.
TWO
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.