Til the End of Time

by Iris Johansen

  "No, I'm fine," she said quickly. "It's dusk. You look pale to me in this light too."

  "Maybe." His gaze was keenly searching. "Still, I think we'll take a fifteen-minute break. There's a stream near here where we can wash off some of the dust."

  It sounded like heaven, but if she stopped, she wasn't sure she'd be able to start again. "I think we'd better go on. We can rest when we get to the airfi—"

  He wasn't listening. He was pushing his way through the shrubbery to the left of the trail, and his pace was speeding up. She had to hurry to catch up with him.

  "Sandor, I really don't want to stop."

  No response. He acted as if he hadn't even heard her.

  "Sandor, listen to me, I—"

  "Alessandra." His tone was very gentle. "Shut the hell up. You're going to rest."

  It appeared she was either going to trail along with him or exhaust herself fighting the stubborn man. At the moment she was having trouble put­ting one foot in front of the other, and was in no shape for a major battle. Her lips tightened grimly as she followed him through the brush. But Sandor was sadly mistaken if he thought he was going to have things all his own way in their relationship. As soon as she recovered she'd have a few things to say to him about his annoying tendency to take charge.

  "Here we are." Sandor unfastened his backpack and dropped it on the ground beside a thin rib­bon of rushing brook. The stream looked crystal-clear, and even the low bubbling sound it made as it tumbled over the rocks was soothing. "I don't think we'd better risk drinking the water, but we can bathe our feet in it." He was pulling off his boots as he spoke. "And I, for one, am looking forward to that pleasure the way Moses did the promised land. Take your shoes and socks off and join me."

  "You go ahead. I'll just wash my face and throat."

  He looked up in surprise. "Don't be silly. You'll feel much better once you've soaked your feet for a while. Take off your shoes."

  She shook her head. "I don't need to soak my feet. I feel great." She smiled determinedly. Why did he have to argue with her? It was difficult enough to stand here near that cool, tempting stream without having to withstand Sandor as well. She unfastened her backpack and dropped it beside Sandor's. She carefully avoided his eyes. There. That's better."

  "Alessandra."

  "No!" Her tone was sharper than she had meant it to be. "I told you I didn't want to do it. Leave me alone."

  "I don't think so." His hand was on her arm. "Look at me, dammit."

  Her gaze lifted defiantly to his face. A flicker of apprehension went through her, which she quickly quelled. His gaze was ruthlessly analytical as it raked her features. She had a fleeting memory of the moment in her bedroom when he had told her he wouldn't have hesitated to shoot her if it had been necessary. This wasn't the Sandor who hek her in his arms last night. This was the Tanzar. "I find I'm very curious to know why you aren'i willing to take off your shoes. I think I'd like tc take a look at your feet." His lips tightened grimly. "It would be just like you to hide a score of blis­ters and not let me know."

  "I don't have blisters." Her lashes lowered to veil her eyes. "Why would you think that? I haven't limped. Not once." "Sit down. I'll take your shoes off myself." The man was as immovable as a mountain. Well, she had to be equally determined in this case. "No. You're being ridiculous. There's no rea­son for you to think—"

  "Alessandra, be quiet." His hands were on her shoulders, and he gave her a little shake. "Now, we can stand here and argue for the next ten minutes, and at the end of that time you'll still take off your shoes, or you can begin to fight me physically, and I'll have you down with your face in the dirt so fast it will make you dizzy." His gaze was as cool as the brook they were standing be­side. "You're a strong woman, but I'm stronger. Don't make me prove it to you."

  He meant exactly what he said. She couldn't hope to win a struggle with him without the ad­vantage of surprise. She had already experienced the power in Sandor's deceptively slim body. She muttered something beneath her breath and plopped down on the bank.

  "I didn't quite catch what you said, but I believe you've cast vile aspersions on my illustrious an­cestors." Sandor grinned as he knelt beside her and began to unlace her left tennis shoe. His

  former hardness had disappeared as quickly as it had come.

  "I told you I don't have blisters. I don't know why you won't believe me. I didn't limp. I know I didn't limp."

  "You keep repeating that." He slid the shoe off her foot and began to peel off the white sock beneath it. "I wonder why? You're very certain. It occurs to me that the only reason you could be so sure you weren't limping is because you were trying hard not to." He looked up into her mutinous face and asked quietly, "Is that what you were doing?"

  "I don't have blisters."

  "We'll see." He tossed the sock aside and glanced down at the foot cradled in his hand. "You have nice feet, strong and shapely."

  "And large."

  "Small feet would look ridiculous on a woman with your proportions." He frowned. "I don't see any blisters on your heels or toes." He started to turn her foot over to examine the sole.

  "No!" She tried to jerk her foot away. "You've already seen that I don't have blisters."

  It was too late. She could tell by the expression on his face: It was stunned and sick.

  "No, you don't have blisters." His voice was thick. "Lord, why didn't you tell me? Is the other foot like this?"

  "Yes." She tried to move her foot, but he wouldn't release it. "I'd like to put on my shoe, please."

  "Not yet. You've nothing to hide anymore." He looked up to reveal eyes glittering with a terrible anger. His hands were shaking as he carefully put her left foot down and began to untie her right shoe. "You've walked over ten miles to keep your damn secret from me, but now it's out in the open." He pulled off her right shoe and sock and carefully turned her foot over and examined it. "You lied to me. This one is much worse."

  She shrugged. "It doesn't hurt any more than the other one." She smiled faintly. "As far as dis­comfort goes they're definitely a matched set."

  His hand tightened around her foot. "Don't joke. I think I could strangle you. Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you put up more of an argument when I told you I was going to make you walk fifteen miles across rough country?" His eyes were blazing in his taut, pale face. "And why didn't you explain that the soles of your feet are so criss­crossed with scar tissue, it's probably impossible to walk more that one mile without excruciating pain?"

  "You said it was safer to walk." She didn't look at him. "I didn't have a right to ask you to run any extra risks because I have a handicap."

  "I would have found a way. You had no right to play the martyr." His fingers touched her scarred instep. "I feel like one of the goons in Naldona's torture squad. Dammit, why couldn't you have trusted me?" The question vibrated with impas­sioned force. "What the hell can I do to show you I'm worthy of your trust? You didn't have to go through this alone. I want to be there for you, but you won't let me. You hide behind your wall of silence and won't let anyone in. Well, I can't take it anymore. I'm not—" He broke off. He was shak­ing as if he had a chill. He closed his eyes. "Oh, dear Lord, what am I saying?" He drew a deep, shuddering breath and opened his eyes. They were still glittering, but not with anger. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to shout at you. You've gone through enough for one day."

  "You didn't shout at me." He hadn't raised his voice, but every word had been so charged with emotion, it had shocked her.

  "No?" He smiled crookedly. "I felt as if I were shouting. The intent was there." He lifted her legs and swung them in a half circle, until they were dangling off the bank. "What do you say I do penance by seeing what I can do to relieve you of some of your 'discomfort'?" He moved to sit beside her on the bank. "By the way, remind me to tell you sometime how much I dislike euphemisms."

  "As much as you dislike women who won't trust you?" She hadn't known she was going to ask that question. It had just tum
bled out of the con­fusion and guilt his accusation had aroused in her.

  "I thought I had made it clear I was way past being able to generalize about you." He didn't look at her as he bent over and carefully rolled up the legs of her jeans. "I can't force you to trust me. It has to come from you, and I don't dislike your lack of trust. It only . . . hurts me." He put first her left foot and then the right into the icy water of the stream. "Stay like this for a while. It will reduce the swelling and relieve the pain. Better?"

  "Much better." She spoke abstractedly, her thoughts still on Sandor's words. She was barely conscious of the cool water running soothingly over her feet. She had hurt him. The knowledge appalled her. She hadn't meant to hurt him. She had wanted to protect him. Yet had the desire to protect been her only motive? He could be right.

  The instinct to safeguard her privacy and inde­pendence had been a part of her so long, she often reacted without thinking.

  But Sandor hadn't been afraid. He had the same warrior instincts she possessed, and still he had confessed his ability to be hurt by her. He had trusted her as she hadn't been able to trust him. "It happened in Said Ababa," she said abruptly.

  "What?" His gaze lifted swiftly to her face.

  "The scars." Her gaze was fixed on the darken­ing patch of sky she could see through the top of the pines. "It happened sixteen years ago in Said Ababa."

  He became very still. "Sixteen years ago you would have been only twelve or thirteen years old. The wounds must have been very deep to create scar tissue like that." He tried to keep his tone expressionless, desperately afraid she would close up again.

  "They were deep. They became infected. I was lucky I didn't get gangrene. Antibiotics were prac­tically nonexistent at the camp." She moistened her lower lip with her tongue. "I probably would have died if it hadn't been for Dimitri."

  "Camp?"

  "I was in a displaced-persons' camp for two years in Said Ababa." The words were halting, and cor­roded with the years of repression. "After the over­throw of the government, the revolutionaries took power. They were even more oppressive than the tyrants they'd replaced."

  "So I've heard." Horror stories had emerged by the hundreds after the revolution, Sandor remem­bered. And Alessandra had been in the center of that relentless reign of terror. "You're an American. How did you come to be in a displaced-persons' camp?"

  "I didn't say I was an American. I said I hold an American passport. I didn't have any passport or any identification at all after the revolution. I could have been any nationality. James said there was a good possibility I was an American, because one of the government officials who ran the camp said he thought he remembered seeing me wandering in the streets of the company town near the Amer­ican oil refinery." She shrugged. "There was some doubt. The town was several hundred miles from where they picked me up. I was barefoot and out of my head with fever, lying by the side of the road. James says walking that distance through the mountains and desert could have been the cause of my lacerated feet."

  "James 'says,' " he repeated slowly. "Don't you know?"

  "No. I don't remember anything before I woke up in the camp. That was why it was difficult to pinpoint my nationality. I spoke English, French, and German fluently. The oil refinery and the town itself were destroyed by the bombing." Her voice lowered. "They tell me the town burned for four days and you could see the flames clawing at the sky from a distance of over a hundred miles."

  Clawing at the sky. The phrase evoked a vivid picture of desperation and terror. Had someone really used those words or had a wisp of memory managed to filter through the barriers a young woman had erected to protect herself from an experience too terrible to remember?

  "There was a protest from the American govern­ment at the time," Sandor said. "But they had

  airlifted most of the personnel who were Ameri­can citizens out of the area before the situation came to a boil. Weren't there any inquiries about you?"

  She shook her head. "There were no records and no inquiries. It's not unusual, when you think about it. There are thousands of people in the world who have cut themselves off from their roots. Maybe my parents were a part of that group."

  "I didn't realize there was a displaced-persons' camp in Said Ababa," Sandor prompted gently. He wanted to fire questions and rip aside the barriers. Patience. It was a miracle she had told him as much as she had. It was obviously very difficult for her.

  "There wasn't a camp for over a year after the revolution. The government was getting flak from several humanitarian groups, and the camp was established to quiet the criticism." Her lips twisted. "Dimitri said the concentration camp he was sent to in Poland as a boy was more humane."

  It was the second time she had mentioned the name. "Dimitri?"

  "Dimitri Sokol, my friend. When I woke up, his was the first face I saw. He took care of me until I was able to walk again. He gave me half his ra­tions because I wasn't able to keep the other pris­oners from stealing the food the guards issued me. He protected me as much as he could." She slowly shook her head. "Which wasn't very much. Dimitri didn't understand the world he'd been born into. He was the gentlest human being I've ever known. He was a scholar, and had been a professor at a university in Warsaw. You would have thought the study of history would have caught him that you have to fight to survive. Saints are usually the first to be martyred."

  "And was your Dimitri a saint?"

  "No, only a man. A kind and generous ..." Her voice broke. "I don't want to talk about Dimitri."

  "Then don't talk about him." His hand reached out to cover her own on the grass. "Don't talk about anything, if you don't want to."

  She was silent for a few minutes. Dimitri was part of it. She couldn't leave Dimitri out of the story and still give . . . She forced herself to speak. "When I was well again, he didn't have to worry about protecting me. I was the one who took care of him. I was young and strong and I knew how to survive." Her voice was fierce. "No one dared steal his rations or mine after I showed what would happen to them if they tried. They were animals. The war had made them animals. Do you know the key to surviving in a world of animals?"

  "No." He didn't know if she even heard him. He had an idea she wasn't there with him anymore.

  "You have to let them know you mean every word you say. If you commit yourself, it has to be with the knowledge that it will be followed up by action. I learned all the moves and developed a few of my own. Most of the time Dimitri didn't realize what was going on. I don't think he wanted to live in a jungle world. I even had to stop him from giving away the food I'd fought to keep. I made sure he had blankets, that he ate, that he exercised. He told me stories and taught me les­sons, and even made me laugh. He kept me hu­man. I would have turned into an animal like the rest of them if it hadn't been for Dimitri. Do you know he even gave me my name? The camp offi cials hadn't bothered. I was just inmate 534. Dimitri said beautiful words lift the heart and I must have a beautiful name so every time I heard it I would know joy. We spent two days choosing it. It was during one of the bad times, and I think he only persisted to try to take my mind off what was going on around me." Her voice was just above a whisper. "He gave me so much more than I gave him, and he didn't even realize it."

  Sandor felt his throat tighten. "You probably gave him more than you knew. You loved him. He must have known that."

  "Yes, he knew I loved him. We never talked about love. It seemed foreign in that place. But he knew." She closed her eyes. "Oh, Lord, I hope he knew. I didn't think he needed the words, but maybe he did. Maybe he died and didn't know how much—"

  "No." Sandor's voice was firm and totally reas­suring. "You're right. Sometimes words aren't nec­essary. Dimitri knew how you felt." Dimitri had died. Sandor had to find a way to shift the subject away from him. He could feel the pain radiating from her. "When did you meet Bruner?"

  "The day Dimitri died."

  What a stupid blunder to have made. He tried to think of a way to ease her away
from the mem­ories, but it was too late. She was back in that hideous hellhole, and her voice held all the pain of a lost soul. "There weren't any antibiotics, did I tell you that? I did everything I could think of to keep him well, but he caught a chill and devel­oped pneumonia. I tried to make the guards get him the medicine he needed. I screamed at them. He was dying, and they wouldn't listen to me." Her nails were biting into his hand. "All I could do was stay with him and watch him struggle to get his breath. He lasted for five days."

  "Alessandra ..."

  "I think I went crazy. I wanted to kill someone. He was the only good thing in my life and they had let him die. I screamed like a lunatic. I at­tacked a guard. We were cursing and rolling around in the dirt of the yard, and I remember how sur­prised the guard looked. They had let Dimitri die and I was just supposed to accept it." Her voice held a note of wonder. "You would have thought they'd know I couldn't do that."

  "No." He ached to take her in his arms and hold her. "You wouldn't be able to do that."

  "James was touring the camp that day, and he saw me struggling with the guard. He stopped the other guards from hurting me when they man­aged to pull me away from him." She opened her eyes. "He talked to me for a long time. I don't remember what he said. He did arrange to have a proper burial for Dimitri. He told me later I'd asked him to do that. I didn't remember. All I knew was that Dimitri was dead and I was alone again. James came back the next day and we talked. He kept coming back day after day. Then he told me he had made arrangements for me to leave the camp and come to live with him at his hotel until he could get me papers to leave Said Ababa."

  Sandor felt a quick flare of anger. "They just turned you over to him?" He tried to keep from his tone the raw, possessive rage the thought evoked. He had no right to feel this damnable jealousy. Choices. He knew how ugly some of the choices had to be. Better Burner's mistress than that monstrosity of a camp.