Charlie Johnson in the Flames. Michael Ignatieff
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.
THREE
He began to shiver so she put him into bed and covered him up, his bandaged hands out flat on his chest. She went to the bathroom and when she came back some minutes later he was asleep, mouth open, looking old and vulnerable. She lay down beside him and watched him sleep, then slept herself, then woke and in the warmth of the bed and his body next to hers, she kissed him. The bedside light was still on, and she saw his eyes open as her lips came down on his. He reached for her, but she laughed softly and pushed his hand away and said, ‘Let me.’
She came down astride him and held his hands back against the pillows so he would not be tempted to help. As she made love to him, there was guileless candour in his eyes. It astonished them both that this was possible, after what had happened to him, and as the known yet unquenchable pleasure rose within her, Etta felt that the rain-bounded night was lifting and that the room’s confines had suddenly opened out on to a future together. She knew a lot about hope, and she knew how to keep it under control, but just then it was seductive.
When Charlie woke a few hours later she was sitting in the chair on the other side of the room, holding a cup of tea and looking out the window. He lay watching her. The scent of her body was on his skin and in the sheets. With men, like with Jacek, you could tell what they were thinking. But with women, you never knew. He was thinking – where the hell do we go from here? – but right away, he knew that she was not. She came over, sat on the edge of the bed, gave him some of her tea and when he seemed fully awake, Etta said, ‘How did you leave her?’
On a slab in the surgical tent, exposed, alone, denuded. Then rolled off the slab into a body bag and then . . . Jesus. He reached for the phone but she got there first and dialled the hospital and held the phone to his ear while he sat up in bed.
The male duty nurse on the 6th Navy hospital switchboard told Charlie that the female civilian, not having any next of kin, had been incinerated. He corrected himself, had been cremated. And the ashes? Charlie wanted to know. These were operational details. Charlie replied that they weren’t goddamned operational details. The woman was . . . and here he faltered, choosing between alternatives, none of