Charlie Johnson in the Flames (7 page)

‘We do this thing together. You are good. I am good. Someone else will do it worse.'

‘Why do it at all?'

Neither said anything. They knew why they did it, but it seemed ridiculous to rehearse the reasons or to evaluate them now that everything had gone wrong and someone had died because of it. You either kept on or you stopped, and neither knew what they would do now. The honest truth was that it didn't depend on what they said or thought, but on how they would feel, much later, when the assignments were offered, when they watched a situation develop somewhere and felt that desire again, to be there, to be in the middle of it and to be working together.

They knew what the mistake had been: to trust Benny, whom Charlie had instinctively recognised as a chancer. It always came down to this sort of judgement of a stranger: would he deliver? would he betray? did he have any capacity to improvise if things went into that zone of uncertainty or chaos? Benny had been the mistake, but what kind of mistake was that? The kind nothing can stop you making, and which you would make again. They'd tried to save her; they'd intended none of this; they weren't responsible for the war; they had been doing their job. End of story.

Except that it wasn't. Or wouldn't be. Or couldn't be.

‘What's Magda say?'

‘That it's too high a price to pay in order just to feel that you are alive.'

It was dark now, and the light on Jacek's face was from the single reading lamp. He was bent over, leaning both palms on his knees, looking nowhere in particular, long thin pale hair falling forward and obscuring half his face. He looked the way he always did, tired and distant, with the possibility of very rapid movement just a second away. But it occurred to Charlie that in all the time they had worked together, he had never asked himself whether Jacek could go on, never wondered whether his friend was feeling the same hollowed-out, desolate feeling inside. For it had been Magda who had made Charlie feel that Jacek must be immune to this desolation. It was strange to think that maybe there was no protection at all against this feeling, not even a woman who would do anything for you.

‘Your wife called again,' Jacek said. ‘Every day in fact.'

Charlie said nothing. Men, in Charlie's experience, did not talk about their wives to other men. Not really. Things were said, but nothing that went close. All Charlie knew, for example, was what Magda did and that they had been together ever since Jacek got out of jail for the trick with the garbage can. He had never told Jacek the least thing about Elizabeth, flautist, music teacher, now deputy school principal. It all just seemed irrelevant, an intrusion on the best thing about their relationship, which was that they were hunters together.

Down in the valley hadn't been the only time Jacek had saved his life. There had been Karte Seh hospital in Kabul, when Hekmatyar's incoming was reducing every adobe wall they sheltered behind to dust. Jacek pulled him away and got them into the Jeep and back to the Intercontinental when Charlie would have pushed them into catching a round or worse. And Charlie had returned the compliment in Huambo, when Jacek stepped around the compound wall to film the boy with the scar on his cheek, coming up the street towards them, Rambo on weed, firing and dancing, weapon on his hip, spraying bullets to and fro, hopping and popping on the balls of his feet. He was shooting up the street the way a kid back home would play with a water hose, but it was Jacek's call – that by turning over just then, the boy wouldn't play the gun on them. Because the kid knew, hey, this is show-time. I'm on TV. The whole world's going to see me dance. And so it proved. He just went right past, jiving and jumping, as Jacek turned and pulled the focus tight on the kid's dilated, bloodshot eyes. Great images. They'd won an award at some film festival. Jacek was concentrating so hard he didn't see the sniper in the charred upstairs window across the street. The first bullet dropped the kid, and the second one would have dropped Jacek, but Charlie got to him first and yanked him back behind the wall.

So this was what bound them together, faith in each other's animal instincts. And it got so that they didn't trust anybody else, or at least Charlie didn't. But he could see that Jacek had always trusted Magda, and that she was one of the sources of sound judgement, no matter how far away they were from each other. Every night Jacek would stroll away from the camp or the bivouac or the compound or the hotel and Charlie would see him on his cellphone talking to her. Charlie had no such resource at home, and he never called when he was out on the road. Well, he had called a couple of times, but the distances were just too great to bridge, him in some fucked-up dive and her and Annie in the kitchen, standing by the fridge with the magnets holding the school schedule and the photo of the three of them in the Rockies. The lines were bad, and when Elizabeth said, don't do this again, he hadn't really disagreed. But that was why he wasn't going home. Not yet, anyway.

He had been in love, Charlie knew, and there were photographs to prove it: Elizabeth in the Italian summer dress with the buttons that undid to reveal that she was wearing nothing underneath; her looking across the table in the restaurant in Volterra as if there was nobody there but him.

He no longer believed his own memory, but he could see what it was like from the photographs. There actually was a shot of that half-kilo bag of cherries, soaked with juice, beginning to disintegrate, on the white sheet of that hotel bedroom in the half-light. The ones they had fed each other, smeared on each other, shutters closed, naked and wet at the very beginning of it all. Those cherries and the purple stain they made on her skin. And the cold-eyed photograph taken before. What kind of idiot takes a photograph of something like that, when he has a woman in a hotel room on a summer afternoon? What's the curatorial impulse? Or worse, what accounts for the sense, from the very beginning, that one day it will be over and he will need proof that it ever took place at all?

He had never thought that he would lose all of this, that it would seem ruined by what had happened after. Weren't some things supposed to be safe from ruin? Like being in love for the first time, in a foreign hotel, on a summer afternoon? Wasn't that supposed to remain untrammelled, no matter how badly everything turned out? Weren't you entitled to remember something like that together, and just feel glad, in your separate ways, that it had been possible? He had no idea how she remembered it, only he was sure it wasn't the way he did.

Come to think of it, what did he and Annie remember in common? He could be out there, in some fly-blown billet at night and count through the time change in order to imagine where his daughter might be at that very hour: on the bus home, with her satchel, or coming through the door for a snack, or lying in bed looking up at the Day-Glo stars she'd patched there to watch their fading when the lights were turned out. No, it wasn't about love, it was about what they had in common. Charlie sat there, Jacek's weight on the end of the bed, and wondered why it was that when he said to Annie, ‘Don't you remember?' she so often didn't. Some times it was because she had been too young, some times because what she remembered was alto gether out of his field of vision, like the time they had made that sunny afternoon climb up the switchbacks of Mount Assiniboine, half of it with her on his back. She didn't remember the top, the view that made you want to cue ‘Ode to Joy' at about 1,000 decibels, and she didn't remember being carried or how good it felt to be together. Her one memory, she said, had been of that squirrel stealing a nut from her pack during the picnic. What picnic? What squirrel? He'd been sitting beside her and he never even saw it. Charlie knew that it was stupid to fret about this kind of thing, but he couldn't help it. The whole point of a family was encapsulated in ‘Do you remember that time when?' In the good old days, he could do that with his own parents. Frank and Mika always gamely joined in, adding embroidery of their own to the tapestry of recollection they made together, though now he had to wonder whether they were humouring him, their one and only. Charlie, thinking like a father now, asked himself what common family memory actually was, what it was that they had been creating together all those years, he, Elizabeth and Annie.

The good thing about Jacek was that you could sit in silence for long periods of time, each of you thinking these kinds of thoughts.

‘You'll have to go home,' Jacek said.

‘I'm not ready,' Charlie replied.

‘She sounds bad,' Jacek observed, noncommittally. It was never his style to tell Charlie what to do. But it was clear that he thought Charlie's habit of endless deferral was beginning to catch up with him.

‘She's fine,' Charlie said, and he meant it. Whatever else was true, Elizabeth would be fine without him.

Magda brought up some soup on a tray. Jacek pulled up a chair and they were going to feed him, but Charlie said he wanted to do it himself. So he tried. The soup didn't always get down his throat, but it felt good to be trying. They sat and watched him.

‘What's your secret?' he said finally, looking at them both, the way they sat there, so companionably together.

‘He is away a lot,' Magda said and smiled. ‘And we are two hours from the city,' Jacek added, pleased that his wife was not going to tell Charlie anything. Jacek went out and came back with a bottle of Wyborowa. ‘To hell with the doctor,' he said, and they passed it around. Charlie liked the way she drank, looking at him as it went down.

He stayed for another four days. He got better and was able to do up his buttons and dress himself and go downstairs, past Magda, working at the kitchen table, out into the yard, feeling the cold run through him. He spent hours in Jacek's workshop, watching him take an old camera apart and clean it, piece by piece, with a set of fine brushes and a jet air blower that made a sharp dry hiss. The paraffin heater between them made them drowsy, and so did the work. Charlie just watched, and Jacek would hold a piece up to the light and clean it and assemble all the pieces on a white linen cloth. He took two cameras apart down to their optics, and then assembled them again. It was quiet in the workshop, and sometimes Jacek wouldn't talk for an hour at a time, and Charlie would sit there and feel the silence as a kind of monastery where he was safe from harm.

Twice a day, they went out and fed the pigs, although Charlie couldn't carry the feed pails so he mostly sluiced out the shit with a hose and leaned over the pens and watched the big ones grunt and feed and the little ones nuzzle and suck. Jacek said that in his experience pigs were the least disappointing creatures he had ever known. They made him a little money too, and when Magda pulled the big ham off the larder beam and cut Charlie a slice, he thought this was the life. Except, of course, that it wasn't. It was theirs.

They had meals in the evenings, and Charlie ran the root vegetables through the colander for Magda, and stood close by her at the sink, and they talked about the book she was copy-editing for a publisher in Hamburg. They listened to gloomy orchestral music from Polish composers – Penderecki, Gorecki, Szymanowski, Magda explained – sitting in silence in the television room, Jacek in the chair by the window, Magda with her bare feet curled up beneath her in a chair on the opposite side of the room, and Charlie lying on the couch, staring upwards and wondering whether music had colour, and what mixture of cobalt, blue and black this music was.

His wife stopped calling, and Etta didn't ring either and he felt that he was at peace, except for the recurring dream of the woman on fire and her embrace. It was as if a moment in time was going to take an eternity to disclose itself, the pressure of her fingers on his shoulder-blades, the force of her cheek against his, the incredible smell of her singed hair, all of it recurring over and over as if struggling still to make its meaning plain.

He talked about the woman with Magda, trying to find a way to describe this terrible feeling of intimacy with a total stranger, how they were locked together in an embrace which had ended with death. What was difficult to find words for was the sense that it had all been a mistake, a joke, a dare between men, with these unbearable consequences for someone whose name he didn't even know. Magda listened – as she must be listening to Jacek telling the same story at night, while she lay by his side in their bedroom – and after a while Charlie realised that it must be puzzling for her that he seemed to expect her to know what it all meant. For she didn't know: she merely seemed to think of the woman as the symbol of all the other people in mortal harm who had impinged upon her husband's life and found their way, momentarily, between the cross-hairs of his lens. She felt compassion for them, but in an abstract kind of way, while for Charlie this woman was no symbol at all. She had been so terribly real that he could not get the smell of her burning flesh out of his memory.

‘You won't always dream about her, Charlie,' was what Magda said, which Charlie knew was true, but not very comforting. If he stopped dreaming about her, Charlie said, he would betray her. If he continued to dream about her, his life would become impossible.

‘What does betrayal have to do with it?' Magda wanted to know, looking up from her manuscript as Charlie walked about her kitchen, sufficiently recovered now to hold the vodka bottle in his hand.

‘Because we're the ones who know what she went through. So if we forget, it just seems even more point less than it already is.'

‘So who makes us Mr Memory?' Jacek wanted to know from the other side of the room.

Charlie laughed. Mr Memory was the best thing in Hitchcock's
Thirty-Nine Steps
, the vaudeville guy with the pencil moustache and a perfect memory, hired by the bad guys to memorise the secret code. It was all a bit far-fetched, but the final scene was great when Mr Memory was on stage in the vaudeville house and Hannay stood up in the smoky audience and asked him to repeat the secret formula, and before the bad guys could stop him, Mr Memory began spilling it out, right there on stage. What was poignant was the look in his eyes, as if he was truly helpless in the face of knowledge and the obligation to disclose it. Standing there on stage, with his wax moustache and bow-tie, transfixed by the obligation to speak, he couldn't help reeling off the secret formula until a bullet from his controller, fired from the wings, put him out of his misery.