The two of them left the cave, the thin, sick child and the frail, weary mother. They had probably come several miles, she carrying the boy most of the way, and now they would walk back. The boy might die anyway. But not of tuberculosis.
There was one more patient: the malang. He was Banda’s holy man. Half mad, and often more-than-half naked, he wandered the Five Lions Valley from Comar, twenty-five miles upstream of Banda, to Charikar in the Russian-controlled plain sixty miles to the southwest. He spoke gibberish and saw visions. The Afghans believed malangs to be lucky, and not only tolerated their behavior, but gave them food and drink and clothing.
He came in, wearing rags around his loins and a Russian officer’s cap. He clutched his middle, miming pain. Jean-Pierre shook out a handful of diamorphine pills and gave them to him. The madman ran off, clutching his synthetic heroin tablets.
“He must be addicted to that stuff by now,” Jane said. There was a distinct note of disapproval in her voice.
“He is,” Jean-Pierre admitted.
“Why do you give it to him?”
“The man has an ulcer. What else should I do—operate?”
“You’re the doctor.”
Jean-Pierre began to pack his bag. In the morning he had to hold a clinic in Cobak, six or seven miles away across the mountains—and he had a rendezvous to keep on the way.
The crying of the five-year-old had brought an air of the past into the cave, like a smell of old toys, or a strange light that makes you rub your eyes. Jean-Pierre felt faintly disoriented by it. He kept seeing people from his childhood, their faces superimposed on the things around him, like scenes from a film cast by a misaligned projector onto the backs of the audience instead of on the screen. He saw his first teacher, the steel-rimmed Mademoiselle Médecin; Jacques Lafontaine, who had given him a bloody nose for calling him con; his mother, thin and ill-dressed and always distraught; and most of all his father, a big, beefy, angry man on the other side of a barred partition.
He made an effort to concentrate on the equipment and drugs he might need at Cobak. He filled a flask with purified water to drink while he was away. He would be fed by the villagers there.
He took his bags outside and loaded them onto the bad-tempered old mare he used for such trips. This animal would walk all day in a straight line but was highly reluctant to turn corners; on account of which Jane had named it Maggie, after Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Jean-Pierre was ready. He went back into the cave and kissed Jane’s soft mouth. As he turned to leave, Fara came in with Chantal. The baby was crying. Jane unbuttoned her shirt and put Chantal to her breast immediately. Jean-Pierre touched his daughter’s pink cheek and said: “Bon appétit.” Then he went out.
He led Maggie down the mountain to the deserted village and headed southwest, following the riverbank. He walked quickly and tirelessly under the hot sun: he was used to it.
As he left his doctor persona behind and thought ahead to his rendezvous, he began to feel anxious. Would Anatoly be there? He might have been delayed. He might even have been captured. If captured, had he talked? Had he betrayed Jean-Pierre under torture? Would there be a party of guerrillas waiting for Jean-Pierre, merciless and sadistic and bent on revenge?
For all their poetry and their piety they were barbarians, these Afghans. Their national sport was buzkashi, a dangerous and bloody game: the headless body of a calf was placed in the center of a field, and two opposing teams lined up on horseback, then, at a rifle shot, they all charged toward the carcass. The aim was to pick it up, carry it to a predetermined turning point about a mile away, and bring it back to the circle without allowing any of the opposing players to wrench it from your grasp. When the grisly object got ripped apart, as often happened, a referee was there to decide which team had control of the larger remnant: Jean-Pierre had come across a game in progress last winter, just outside the town of Rokha down the Valley, and he had watched it for a few minutes before realizing that they were not using a calf, but a man, and the man was still alive. Sickened, he had tried to stop the game, but someone had told him the man was a Russian officer, as if that were all the explanation anyone could possibly want. The players just ignored Jean-Pierre then, and there was nothing he could do to get the attention of fifty highly excited riders intent on their savage game. He had not stayed to watch the man die, but perhaps he should have, for the image that remained in his mind, and returned to him every time he worried about being found out, was of that Russian, helpless and bleeding, being torn to pieces alive.
The sense of the past was still with him, and as he looked at the khaki-colored rock walls of the gully through which he was striding, he saw scenes from his childhood alternating with nightmares about being caught by the guerrillas. His earliest memory was of the trial, and of the overwhelming sense of outrage and injustice he had felt when they had sent his papa to jail. He could hardly read, but he could make out his father’s name in the newspaper headlines. At that age—he must have been four—he did not know what it meant to be a hero of the Resistance. He knew his father was a Communist, as were his father’s friends, the priest and the cobbler and the man behind the counter, in the village post office; but he thought they called him Red Roland because of his ruddy complexion. When his father was convicted of treason and sentenced to five years in jail, they had told Jean-Pierre that it had to do with Uncle Abdul, a frightened brown-skinned man who had stayed in the house for several weeks, and who was from the FLN, but Jean-Pierre did not know what the FLN was and thought they meant the elephant in the zoo. The only thing he understood clearly and always believed was that the police were cruel and the judges were dishonest and the people were fooled by the newspapers.
As the years went by he understood more and suffered more and his sense of outrage grew. When he went to school the other boys said his father was a traitor. He told them that, on the contrary, his father had fought bravely and risked his life in the war, but they did not believe him. He and his mother went to live in another village for a while, but somehow the neighbors found out who they were and told their children not to play with Jean-Pierre. But the worst part was visiting the prison. His father changed visibly, becoming thin, pale and sickly; but worse than that was to see him confined, dressed in a drab uniform, cowed and frightened, saying “sir” to strutting bullies with truncheons. After a while the smell of the prison began to make Jean-Pierre nauseous, and he would throw up as soon as he entered its doors; and his mother stopped taking him.
It was not until Papa came out of prison that Jean-Pierre talked to him at length and finally understood it all, and saw that the injustice of what had happened was even more gross than he had thought. After the Germans invaded France the French Communists, being already organized in cells, had played a leading role in the Resistance. When the war was over his father had carried on the fight against right-wing tyranny. At that time Algeria had been a French colony. Its people were oppressed and exploited but struggling courageously for their freedom. Young Frenchmen were conscripted into the army and forced to fight against the Algerians in a cruel war in which the atrocities committed by the French Army reminded many people of the work of the Nazis. The FLN, which Jean-Pierre would always associate with the image of a mangy old elephant in a provincial zoo, was the Front de Libération Nationale, the National Liberation Front of the Algerian people.