"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 then-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.
She shivered despite the heat. This talk of killing was grotesque. When two people take such delight in one another's bodies as we do, she thought, how can they possibly do each other violence?
As she reached the village she began to hear the random, exuberant gunfire that signified an Afghan celebration. She made her way to the mosque—everything happened at the mosque. The convoy was in the courtyard, men and horses and baggage surrounded by smiling women and squealing children. Jane stood at the edge of the crowd, watching. It was worth it, she thought. It was worth the worry and the fear, and it was worth manipulating Mohammed in that undignified way, in order to see this, the men safely reunited with their wives and mothers and sons and daughters.
What happened next was probably the greatest shock of her life.
There in the crowd, among the caps and turbans, appeared a head of curly blond hair. At first she did not recognize it, even though its familiarity tugged at her heartstrings. Then it emerged from the crowd, and she saw, hiding behind an incredibly bushy blond beard, the face of Ellis Thaler.
Jane's knees suddenly felt weak. Ellis? Here? It was impossible.
He walked toward her. He was wearing the loose pajamalike cotton clothes of the Afghans, and a dirty blanket around his broad shoulders. The little of his face that was still visible above the beard was deeply tanned, so that his sky-blue eyes were even more striking than usual, like cornflowers in a field of ripe wheat.
Jane was struck dumb.
Ellis stood in front of her, his face solemn. "Hello, Jane."
She realized she no longer hated him. A month ago she would have cursed him for deceiving her and spying on her friends; but now her anger had gone. She would never like him, but she could tolerate him. And it was nice to hear English spoken for the first time in more than a year.
"Ellis," she said weakly. "What in heaven's name are you doing here?"
"The same as you," he said.
What did that mean? Spying? No, Ellis did not know what Jean-Pierre was.
Ellis saw Jane's confused expression and said: "I mean I'm here to help the rebels."
Would he find out about Jean-Pierre? Jane was suddenly afraid for her husband. Ellis might kill him—
"Who does the baby belong to?" Ellis said.
"Me. And Jean-Pierre. Her name is Chantal." Jane saw that Ellis suddenly looked terribly sad. She realized he had been hoping to find her unhappy with her husband. Oh, God, I think he's still in love with me, she thought. She tried to change the subject. "But how will you help the rebels?"
He hefted his bag. It was a large, sausage-shaped thing of khaki canvas, like an old-fashioned soldier's kitbag. "I'm going to teach them how to blow up roads and bridges," he said. "So, you see, in this war I'm on the same side as you."
But not the same side as Jean-Pierre, she thought. What will happen now? The Afghans did not for one moment suspect Jean-Pierre, but Ellis was trained in the ways of deception. Sooner or later he would guess what was going on. "How long are you going to be here?" she asked him. If it was a short stay he might not have time to develop suspicions.