Charlie Johnson in the Flames. Michael Ignatieff
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,