The thought gave Jane courage. “I want you to take me home,” she said abruptly.
At first he misunderstood her. “We’ve only just got here,” he said irritably; then he looked at her and his frown cleared. “Oh,” he said.
There was a note of imperturbability in his voice which Jane found ominous, and she realized that she might not get her way without a struggle. “Yes,” she said firmly. “Home.”
He put his arm around her. “This country gets one down at times,” he said. He was not looking at her but at the rushing river far below their feet. “You’re especially vulnerable to depression at the moment, just after the birth. In a few weeks’ time, you’ll find—”
“Don’t patronize me!” she snapped. She was not going to let him get away with that kind of nonsense. “Save your bedside manner for your patients.”
“All right.” He took his arm away. “We decided, before we came, that we would stay here for two years. Short tours are inefficient, we agreed, because of the time and money wasted in training, traveling and settling down. We were determined to make a real impact, so we committed ourselves to a two-year stint—”
“And then we had a baby.”
“It wasn’t my idea!”
“Anyway, I’ve changed my mind.”
“You’re not entitled to change your mind.”
“You don’t own me!” she said angrily.
“It’s out of the question. Let us stop discussing it.”
“We’ve only just begun,” she said. His attitude infuriated her. The conversation had turned into an argument about her rights as an individual, and somehow she did not want to win by telling him that she knew about his spying, not yet anyway; she wanted him to admit that she was free to make her own decisions. “You have no right to ignore me or override my wishes,” she said. “I want to leave this summer.”
“The answer is no.”
She decided to try reasoning with him. “We’ve been here a year. We have made an impact. We’ve also made considerable sacrifices, more than we anticipated. Haven’t we done enough?”
“We agreed on two years,” he said stubbornly.
“That was a long time ago, and before we had Chantal.”
“Then the two of you should go, and leave me here.”
For a moment Jane considered that. To travel on a convoy to Pakistan carrying a baby was difficult and dangerous. Without a husband it would be a nightmare. But it was not impossible. However, it would mean leaving Jean-Pierre behind. He would be able to continue betraying the convoys, and every few weeks more husbands and sons from the Valley would die. And there was another reason why she could not leave him behind: it would destroy their marriage. “No,” she said. “I can’t go alone. You must come, too.”
“I will not,” he said angrily. “I will not!”
Now she had to confront him with what she knew. She took a deep breath. “You’ll just have to,” she began.
“I don’t have to,” he interrupted. He pointed his forefinger at her, and she looked into his eyes and saw something there that frightened her. “You can’t force me to. Don’t try.”
“But I can—”
“I advise you not to,” he said, and his voice was terribly cold.
Suddenly he seemed a stranger to her, a man she did not know. She was silent for a moment, thinking. She watched a pigeon rise up from the village and fly toward her. It homed in on the cliff face a little way below her feet. I don’t know this man! she thought in a panic. After a whole year I still don’t know who he is! “Do you love me?” she asked him.
“Loving you doesn’t mean I have to do everything you want.”
“Is that a yes?”
He stared at her. She met his gaze unflinchingly. Slowly the hard, manic light went out of his eyes, and he relaxed. At last he smiled. “It’s a yes,” he said. She leaned toward him, and he put his arm around her again. “Yes, I love you,” he said softly. He kissed the top of her head.
She rested her cheek on his chest and looked down. The pigeon she had watched flew off again. It was a white pigeon, like the one in her invented vision. It floated away, gliding effortlessly down toward the far bank of the river. Jane thought: Oh, God, what do I do now?
It was Mohammed’s son, Mousa—now known as Left Hand—who was the first to spot the convoy when it returned. He came racing into the clearing in front of the caves, yelling at the top of his voice: “They’re back! They’re back!” Nobody needed to ask who they were.
It was midmorning, and Jane and Jean-Pierre were in the cave clinic. Jane looked at Jean-Pierre. The faintest hint of a puzzled frown crossed his face: he was wondering why the Russians had not acted on his intelligence and ambushed the convoy. Jane turned away from him so that he should not see the triumph she felt. She had saved their lives! Yussuf would sing tonight, and Sher Kador would count his goats, and Ali Ghanim would kiss each of his fourteen children. Yussuf was one of Rabia’s sons: saving his life repaid Rabia for helping to bring Chantal into the world. All the mothers and daughters who would have been in mourning could now rejoice.
She wondered how Jean-Pierre felt. Was he angry, or frustrated, or disappointed? It was hard to imagine someone being disappointed because people had not been killed. She stole a glance at him, but his face was blank. I wish I knew what’s going on in his mind, she thought.
Their patients melted away within minutes: everybody was going down to the village to welcome the travelers home. “Shall we go down?” Jane said.
“You go,” Jean-Pierre said. “I’ll finish up here, then follow you.”
“All right,” said Jane. He wanted some time to compose himself, she guessed, so that he could pretend to be delighted at their safe return when he saw them.
She picked up Chantal and took the steep footpath toward the village. She could feel the heat of the rock through the thin soles of her sandals.
She still had not confronted Jean-Pierre. However, this could not go on indefinitely. Sooner or later he would learn that Mohammed had sent a runner to divert the convoy from its prearranged route. Naturally he would then ask Mohammed why this had been done, and Mohammed would tell him about Jane’s “vision.” But Jean-Pierre knew Jane did not believe in visions. . . .
Why am I afraid? she asked herself. I’m not the guilty one—he is. Yet I feel as if his secret is something I must be ashamed of. I should have spoken to him about it immediately, that evening we walked up to the top of the cliff. By nursing it to myself for so long, I, too, have become a deceiver. Perhaps that’s it. Or perhaps it’s the peculiar look in his eyes sometimes. . . .
She had not given up her determination to go home, but so far she had failed to think of a way to persuade Jean-Pierre to go. She had dreamed up a dozen bizarre schemes, from faking a message to say that his mother was dying, to poisoning his yogurt with something that would give him the symptoms of an illness which would force him to return to Europe for treatment. The simplest, and least far-fetched, of her ideas was to threaten to tell Mohammed that Jean-Pierre was a spy. She would never do it, of course, for to unmask him would be as good as killing him. But would Jean-Pierre think she might carry out the threat? Probably not. It would take a hard, pitiless, stone-hearted man to believe her capable of virtually killing her husband—and if Jean-Pierre were that hard and pitiless and stone-hearted, he might kill Jane.