She walked on. Next she had to deal with Jean-Pierre. He would be home around dusk: he would have waited until midafternoon, when the sun was a little less hot, before starting on his journey, just as Mohammed had. She felt that Jean-Pierre would be easier to handle than Mohammed had been. For one thing, she could tell the truth with Jean-Pierre. For another, he was in the wrong.
She reached the caves. The little encampment was busy now. A flight of Russian jets soared across the sky. Everyone stopped work to watch them, although they were too high and too far away for bombing. When they had gone the small boys stuck out their arms like wings and ran around making jet-engine sounds. In their imaginary flights, Jane wondered, who were they bombing?
She went into the cave, checked on Chantal, smiled at Fara and took out the journal. Both she and Jean-Pierre wrote in it almost every day. It was primarily a medical record, and they would take it back to Europe with them for the benefit of others who would follow them to Afghanistan. They had been encouraged to record personal feelings and problems, too, so that others would know what to expect; and Jane had written quite full notes on her pregnancy and the birth of Chantal; but it was a highly censored account of her emotional life that had been logged.
She sat with her back to the cave wall and the book on her knee, and wrote the story of the eighteen-year-old boy who had died of allergic shock. It made her feel sad but not depressed—a healthy reaction, she told herself.
She added brief details of today's minor cases, then, idly, she leafed backward through the volume. The entries in Jean-Pierre's slapdash, spidery handwriting were highly abbreviated, consisting almost entirely of symptoms, diagnoses, treatments and results: Worms, he would write, or Malaria; then Cured or Stable or sometimes Died. Jane tended to write sentences such as She felt better this morning or The mother has tuberculosis. She read about the early days of her pregnancy, sore nipples and thickening thighs and nausea in the morning. She was interested to see that almost a year ago she had written I'm frightened of Abdullah. She had forgotten that.
She put the journal away. She and Fara spent the next couple of hours cleaning and tidying up the cave clinic; then it was time to go down into the village and prepare for the night. As she walked down the mountainside and then busied herself in the shopkeeper's house, Jane considered how to handle her confrontation with Jean-Pierre. She knew what to do—she would take him for a walk, she thought—but she was not sure exactly what to say.
She still had not made up her mind when he arrived a few minutes later. She wiped the dust from his face with a damp towel and gave him green tea in a china cup. He was pleasantly tired, rather than exhausted, she knew: he was capable of walking much longer distances. She sat with him while he drank his tea, trying not to stare at him, thinking: You lied to me. When he had rested for a little while, she said: "Let's go out, like we used to."
He was a little surprised. "Where do you want to go?"
"Anywhere. Don't you remember, last summer, how we used to go out just to enjoy the evening?''
He smiled. "Yes, I do." She loved him when he smiled like that. He said: "Will we take Chantal?"
"No." Jane did not want to be distracted. "She'll be fine with Fara.''
"All right," he said, faintly bemused.
Jane told Fara to prepare their evening meal—tea, bread and yogurt—then she and Jean-Pierre left the house. The daylight was fading and the evening air was mild and fragrant. This was the best time of day in summer. As they strolled through the fields to the river, she recalled how she had felt on this same pathway last summer: anxious, confused, excited, and determined to succeed. She was proud that she had coped so well, but glad the adventure was about to end.
She began to feel tense as the moment of confrontation drew nearer, even though she kept telling herself that she had nothing to hide, nothing to feel guilty about and nothing to fear. They waded across the river at a place where it spread wide and shallow over a rock shelf, then they climbed a steep, winding path up the face of the cliff on the other side. At the top they sat on the ground and dangled their legs over the precipice. A hundred feet below them, the Five Lions River hurried along, jostling boulders and foaming angrily through the rapids. Jane looked over the Valley. The cultivated ground was crisscrossed with irrigation channels and stone terrace walls. The bright green-and-gold colors of ripening crops made the fields look like shards of colored glass from a smashed toy. Here and there the picture was blemished by bomb damage—fallen walls, blocked ditches, and craters of mud amid the waving grain. The occasional round cap or dark turban showed that some of the men were already at work, bringing in their crops as the Russians parked their jets and put away their bombs for the night. Scarved heads or smaller figures were women and older children, who would help while the light lasted. On the far side of the Valley the farmland struggled to climb the lower slopes of the mountain, but soon surrendered to the dusty rock. From the cluster of houses off to the left the smoke of a few cooking fires rose in pencil-straight lines until the light breeze untidied it. The same breeze brought unintelligible snatches of conversation from the women bathing beyond a bend in the river upstream. Their voices were subdued, and Zahara's hearty laugh was no longer heard, for she was in mourning. And all because of Jean-Pierre. . . .
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."