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Authors: Michael Ignatieff

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Kosovo (Republic), #Psychological Fiction, #Political, #Psychological

Charlie Johnson in the Flames (2 page)

BOOK: Charlie Johnson in the Flames
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She would have known the track well. It started right across the road from her house, in the woods at the end of her village. Before the war, there wouldn't have been dogs, snipers and patrols. This was just a trail, one of the dozens that the herders used. When the war came, she would have heard the fighters – her fighters – taking the path at night, down from the plateau on the other side of the border filing past her house to take on the blue half-track and the militia squads in the valley. So now, in her extremity, she must have thought: my knowledge will save me. I will lead these foreigners and keep them to the path and, at the top, someone will stop this pain. So, after Jacek and Benny had put her down she walked ahead of them all, a woman in tatters leading them to safety in the dark.

She had been too shocked, too possessed by pain to look back. Her house was burning to the ground, her village was in flames. Charlie knew what it was that she should be spared, what she should never have to see: the way the hands would clutch the face, and the body would cower and tuck its legs in upon itself in vain search for protection from the flames. If she had seen him like this, her own father, she might have lain down and given up. Instead she kept walking upwards with the foreigners. They kept giving her water and she just kept walking. They hadn't thought she could make it, but she had.

She had run from the house towards the woods where Charlie, Jacek and Benny were hiding, running with her arms outstretched, with the fire on her back flaring like a cloak. Hair on fire, back on fire, dress on fire, flames clinging to her while she ran. He jumped into the road to stop her because he knew – with lunatic clarity – that running was a mistake. Running fans the flames. You never run when you're on fire, every book tells you that, you flatten out, roll in the dust. So he stepped into her path to stop her and she ran right into him, so that they rolled together in the red dirt of the road until they were one crumpled roll of melded flesh, Charlie beating on her back with his hands to douse the flames. As if he, Charlie Johnson, had been chosen by her embrace and anointed like her with the flames. He knew he was crying out, and when he next opened his eyes, she was lying on top of him, stinking of gasoline and burned skin. She was shaking, and he was too, and they kept still, knowing that the squad might still be at the end of the road. He thought that if they did not move someone might take them for dead. He was aware enough to feel that their bodies were transmitting identical intimations of fear. He could hear the flames from the burning roofs and shouts and the pop-pop of small arms. They were so tightly entwined that he could not see her face, but he could hear her moaning next to his ear.

And then Jacek crossed his line of sight, running low with the camera skimming the ground. He flung himself down ten feet away and began to turn over: the house burning, the blue half-track reversing and dis appearing out of sight around the bend, all filmed through the wobbly alembic of fear. When Jacek had the shot, he pulled the cassette, jammed it into his pocket and ran over to get them to their feet and into the woods before the patrol returned. Only the patrol didn't return. Darkness swung the advantage their way. The squad would not risk an ambush. Charlie knew they could now move out and take the woman with them, back the way they came. Only later, when they were on the plateau waiting for the helicopter, Charlie realised that Jacek had done something he had never done in their many years of working together: he'd left a camera behind.

All the way up the track, Charlie had thought that she might die. But now it seemed just as obvious that she would survive. People did. There was no reason this had to spin out of control. Looking down, he could see the lights of the airfield and he could feel the chopper coming down fast.

Soon there would be clear water and clean sheets. Surgical scissors would cut the singed garments off her body. Nurses would apply salves and ointments, ice packs to bring down the temperature of the skin. Fluids and plasma would perfuse her veins and she would sleep. She would awake and he would be there to make sure that she was all right. She would get grafts and have months of treatment, courtesy of the US Navy. She couldn't go back, because her village had been torched and her father was gone. But she would be alive, and she was young, and that was something.

As for Charlie, he knew he was finished. For thirty years he had been fucked around by rogues and chancers and drugged-up hoods at checkpoints from Kabul to Kigali, but none of them had ever laid a glove on him, not really. He had heard the bullets whine over his head but in all that time he had never believed any of them were meant for him. He had seen the flames and always believed they would not touch him. Until that after noon. When he pulled his hands away to see that they were covered with the carbonised remnants of her flesh and his own. Afterwards, waiting for the helicopter, he had sat in the dark, shaking from head to foot, so fully given over to fear that there seemed nothing left of him but terror. Yes, he was finished.

He had left Jacek behind and he was too tired to care. You weren't ever supposed to leave crew behind, and the bureau wouldn't let him forget that, even if it hadn't been his fault. He had not been a hero, and the thought did not bother him in the slightest. If you didn't know what fear was, you were in no position to say a thing.

The patrol of blue half-tracks had come in the quiet, with such stealth that Charlie didn't realise they were there until the roof-tops at the far end of the village began to smoulder and burn. It was unbelievable to watch from the safety of the trees while the squad went from house to house, pulling people out, half-dressed, and leading the men away. He had no idea, and probably she wouldn't know how to explain it either, why she had been the one of all the village women who resisted, rushing up to the squad leader, pleading on behalf of her house, her possessions, her father still inside. She had been so vehement she did not even see the green jerry-can arcing behind her until the gasoline slopped over her back.

Charlie saw it all from his hiding place at the clearing's edge. The others in the squad had their balaclavas on, but not the commander. He had taken the cowl off, as if to say: I am the one who makes the fire come. I am the one you will fear. The lighter flicked open in his hand and he touched her back.

He watched her run, even stayed the hand of one of his men who drew a bead to fire at the back of her head. He let her run. He had all the time in the world. He watched her dance and tear at herself, until he lost sight of her round the bend of the road. Then he got into the half-track and reversed out of the village.

Her hand was limp as he held it and he wondered whether they would ever be so intimate again. It was clear that the scene they had lived through would remain unmastered as long as he lived and that this race to save her would never undo the fact that he had watched it happen and had been unable to stop it.

The helicopter felt for the pad and settled down. The doors were pulled open and they had a gurney right up under the rotors. They lifted her on and a team raced her away along the tarmac, and two medics were holding him by the elbows, until he shook them away. Everyone left him alone after that. He said he would walk, and they left him to follow the team that was running the gurney into emergency. He could see the low caterpillar shape of the mobile naval hospital, the brown network of tents where they worked on mine victims and emergency medical evacuations from the zone. The air was cold and scented with jet fuel. The interdiction flights were running twenty-four hours a day. In the distance, at the far end of the runway, the Nighthawks were poised for take-off, their fantails glowing crimson. He felt the fear ebbing from him with every step he took. He could see the nurses just ahead, in the light of the halogen arcs at the admission bay of the hospital, taking her inside.

He followed her down the low corridors, lit by sloping arches of 40-watt bulbs, conscious now, as he passed the young surgeons in their theatre scrubs and the naval orderlies in their browns, that he was dirty and blood-soaked and unwell. But they stopped him when the gurney was wheeled into the surgery bay, behind two plastic flanges that closed against him. Two medics sat him down, and a nurse poured sweet milky coffee down his throat, which stopped him shaking, and they attended to his hands. They laid him down on a bed and they put him on a drip, and a blonde nurse, with her mouth covered in hospital green, had his hands on her lap, cleaning them with swabs. Everything hurt, and he said so, and she gave him an injection and he felt nothing at all and lay on his back watching night moths slam their heads into the rows of naked bulbs that snaked down the apex of the tent. The heat ventilators were roaring and the tent flaps were billowing, and dust from the moths' damaged wings filtered through the light and Charlie felt he had made it home and dry. He was lying back with his eyes open, when a young surgeon in scrubs came in. He wanted to know whether he knew her, and Charlie asked, ‘What do you mean?' and he said that the female civilian was DOA – or shortly thereafter, he corrected himself – and that since he was going to have to process her, he had to know her name.

‘She didn't have one,' Charlie said. For the rest of his life he was to wonder why he had ever allowed himself to believe it would end in any other way.

T
WO

                                                                  

C
harlie was on the bed in the Esplanade, propped up on the pillows, wrapped in a towel. Etta was beside him. Her skin was damp from the shower and smelt of a face cream he didn't recognise. ‘What is this stuff?' he said, reaching up with his bandaged hand to touch her cheek. ‘Can't remember,' she said. She was in a hotel dressing gown and she had pulled up the pillows behind her. It was well after midnight. He had been talking from almost the moment she arrived. She said, ‘Go on.'

Benny had driven the Jeep to the edge of the plateau where the long ravine down into the valley began. It was two in the morning, they had given the competition the slip, and if they did this right, they would be back in the bar for breakfast, with the other crews none the wiser. They left everything they could – lights, batteries, extra tape and medical kit – in the Jeep. The path, about fifty yards from where they parked, dropped steeply and they went down single file, listening to each other's breathing and the sound of their boots on the stones. They couldn't use any light, so they stumbled and grabbed for the low branches and swore. Yes, he had been scared and depressed as well.

‘Why depressed?' she asked, reaching over to the cigarette pack on the night table. She didn't smoke, but he did when he felt like this, and she lit it for him and put it between his lips and then took it away.

Before the war began, when the border was patrolled by the international monitors, he told her, Charlie had seen pictures of one of the rebel incursion units that had walked into trouble, when they were infiltrating down into the valley. Some cold-eyed guy from the inter nationals' forensic unit had taken Polaroid after Polaroid up close. Charlie had run through twenty-eight of the pictures, including one of a woman, good-looking in her camouflage, with brown hair and a shocked expres sion, as well she might have, since she had walked right into the ambush and would not have seen anything except some muzzle flash in pitch blackness before she felt her life fly out of her chest like a bird.

So yes he was scared, and when he got scared, he got depressed. It was adolescent to court danger at his age. Danger had to have some necessity to it and there was no real necessity here. They were crossing the border, in the middle of a war, going down into the valley, just to file some tape showing that the border villages weren't held by the other side, as they claimed, but by Benny's people. It was a ‘good story'.

‘Good stories pay for my house,' was Jacek's line. The prince of cameramen, melancholy, withdrawn, with the loping gait of a hunter, and stringy blond hair like a dog's ears that came down to meet the collar of that battered brown leather jacket. Charlie blinked: he knew he was not functioning properly if the thought of Jacek tore him up.

So they were going down the ravine in the dark, on the wrong side of the border, because it was a good story, because all the crews at the refugee camp had been looking for a way to do it and no one finally had the balls to go for it except them. And yes, precisely because they were the oldest crew in the bar, the one with the most miles on the clock, balls had been allowed to decide the question. That was what he was trying to explain to her: from the night in the bar when he and Jacek had drunk too much and Benny had said, ‘You don't believe me, I'll take you,' well you had to go.

‘Why?' she said.

‘Santini was in the bar too.'

‘So?'

Her scepticism was unanswerable. Santini's presence should not have made a difference. But it had. It was a case of animal dislike – of Santini's custom-tailored safari jacket, his enraging neatness, and yes, let's admit it now, his youth – making you do stupid things. Fear of being thought ridiculous was a major reason why men did ridiculous things. Charlie knew this and nonetheless had done something that had been a lot more than ridiculous. ‘You figure it out,' he said. She said nothing, which was good, since he wasn't in a mood to be told what a fool he had been.

He put some blame for it on the American Bar. An absurd name for an absurd place. It stood a half-mile from the refugees' tents and the stand-pipes and the women pulling up their trousers after a trip to the slit trench. The bar was down a stinking alley, and it had an improbable garden, someone's idea of an oasis, laid down in crazy-paving, which they kept hosing down, and a little fountain, and heavy pine trees all around it shielding it from the squalor of the town. Strewn around the garden on those white chairs were the same foreign news crews night after night, drinking poison and not even pretending to know what they were waiting for. All the refugee stories, the heart-warming, heart-rending stuff had been done and they couldn't cover the war because the war was all but invisible. You could hear the Nighthawks, and sometimes you could see the detonations and once or twice a week they'd be close enough to shake the ground, but otherwise Charlie thought he might as well be back at the bureau watching it on the monitors.

BOOK: Charlie Johnson in the Flames
9.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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