Charlie Johnson in the Flames

by Michael Ignatieff

  They had become friends, but he couldn’t remember when. Not at first, but slowly over the years. He would sit on the edge of her desk, pass her a cup of coffee from the machine and that was when he got used to talking to her, got used to her kind of listening, which was intent and detached and seemed to know where he was going before he got there. He would tell her about the assignments, and because she’d done the flights and hotels, hired the fixer, she understood. She knew where you could get a decent camera in Peshawar or Luanda or whatever, and had once hired a plane which extricated him from Kigali when nobody was landing there. Her competence back at the fort came to be something he depended on in the field. You could tell your story quickly and she didn’t need a lot of explanation. So a certain complicity had developed. One-sided, he now realised, because he didn’t talk about home and she never ventured the slightest hint about her private life. The one time he took a step into that terrain, asking what she was doing that weekend, she replied, looking up over her glasses, ‘That is none of your business.’ And then she threw him out because she had too much paper, she said. ‘Get out, Charlie. Come back some other time. I’m busy now.’

  Then there came the day he returned from the funeral in the States. She stopped him in the corridor to say that he didn’t look so good, and he walked into her office and slumped in the seat in front of her desk. He told her about his dad, a lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers, out of Des Moines, six foot four and a half in his stocking feet, who had liberated the camp, with Mika in it, in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1945. He had taken Mika back to Dedham, Mass., where he turned her into an American and gave her a sense that the world would always be steady under their feet, until the Sunday morning when Mika found him by the work-bench, every spanner, wrench and screwdriver still in its place on the wall, lying on the garage floor, dead of a heart attack at sixty-three. If Charlie thought about it now, Frank’s passing was the beginning of the bad period, for Mika had nestled like a bird in Frank’s arms for forty years. When he was no longer there, she soon ceased to be there either, which was why their son, Charles Johnson, who had gone to war like his father and trusted to his strength as much as she had, sat in Etta’s office and found himself swallowing his tears.

  You could explain their being in the hotel together, he thought, by this history of confession, except that you wouldn’t want to exaggerate. Apart from that one time, talking about the death of both of his parents, there hadn’t been all that much confessing.

  There was a lot she did not know, like, for example, why he had called her, and not his wife, when the Navy hospital had discharged him. He didn’t either. So that made two of them. They were there in the hotel, waiting until the reason became obvious to both of them, and he would either return to his life or blow it up.

  ‘You are in the rootcellar, Charlie,’ she said.

  The squad didn’t come through the door, not then anyway. The half-track moved on slowly with its treads making a clinking sound like hot coals slipping down in a grate. Nobody moved, not in the cellar, not in the house above. It was like that for hours. They did nothing but sit there, once moving over to the pile of onions to piss, which left them stuck with the smell of their urine and the onions mixing together in the dirt.

  A man could die of restlessness. If you believed you had to take charge of all the waiting – that was the way to get yourself wasted. That day he learned from Jacek how to wait: to go into a special Polish Catholic zone of attentive motionlessness, waiting for the sun to make its transit of the dirty window, watching the blades of grass flame as the sun went through them.

  But the people in the house went out. From the cellar window, Charlie couldn’t see more than an old man and the woman, who must have been his daughter, working in the vegetable patch. The patrol came by twice. If the old man and the woman were hiding the presence of the strangers in their rootcellar, they were doing a terrific job. If they were about to betray them, they were also doing a terrific job. Charlie had no idea what was going to happen.

  The light was fading, and the cover of a possible escape was coming up rapidly when Benny flicked on the radio and whispered his call sign. Jacek leaned his head against the cellar wall and closed his eyes. ‘Idiot,’ he whispered. Exactly. As if the patrols weren’t monitoring every band. Then there was a scratchy reply, low but distinct. So now they had to move, because the patrols would be back, zeroing in on where Benny’s signal came from.

  Benny went first, beckoning them up from the cellar and giving them the run sign, and they hurtled down the short passage to the light, clearing the village track and blundering into the trees the other side. When they reached the woods, Charlie turned and looked back: there were eyes watching him from the window of the house.

  ‘We shouldn’t have left them.’

  ‘It happened too fast,’ she said.

  She was not there to pronounce absolution. But then it occurred to him it wasn’t she who was interested in absolution. It was him.

  Benny hadn’t been that wrong, just five hundred yards wrong, and they found the rebel command post on the first ridge among the pines, within sight of the house. Except that ‘command post’ was ridiculous for just a dugout so well hidden that it might have been a trap for animals. There were three of them, village boys, absurdly young and not exactly inspiring confidence, but they had face camouflage which made them look like semi-serious killers and in the forest gloom Charlie could see RPGs, Zastavas and some armour-piercing shells on a clip. Jacek was happy because he could turn over and Charlie did a breathless stand-up, in the dug-out, trying to project enough sound volume to get picked up on the camera mike, but not enough to get them caught, with the red-rimmed eyes of the fighters just visible at the rear of the shot. Looks real, Jacek said, after he had checked the gate, except that Charlie knew it wasn’t especially real. The camera always had a way of flattening things out, leaching the danger out of any moment. Danger or not, it was a good career move. Charlie had a report proving that the guerrillas were still active in villages within four miles of the border. And the twenty-somethings were still dozing in the American Bar. Now all they had to do was get it up the hillside when the dark ness came, reach the sat phone in the Jeep and beam it back.

  ‘So Shandler could pass you in the hall and give you his significant nod,’ Etta said.

  ‘Fuck Shandler. And his significant nod,’ Charlie said.

  He slowly slipped down so that he was lying with his head in her lap. She did not play with his hair; she did not stroke his chin or rub her hand along his eyebrows. She let him use her lap: that was all. And she would stick a cigarette between his lips from time to time. His palms hurt and when he went to scratch them against each other, she stopped him. ‘You were lucky,’ the surgeon said. ‘All you needed to lose was another fraction of an inch, and you’d have been in trouble.’ A half-second more. The terrifying unworthiness of good luck.

  Etta asked if he had seen Jacek’s footage, but he shook his head. There was a television in the room, but he didn’t even want to watch the competition. Santini was probably down there right now. The blood would draw the flies.

  They thought it was going to be all right, the three of them sitting there in the dug-out with the village boys, waiting for another half-hour more of darkness to cover their escape back up the track to safety. It was amazing to him now, this foolish hopefulness. After almost thirty years in the business, how many times had he been shot at? How many times had he and Jacek put their noses above some wall and made a calculation: Do we run? Do we stay? Which way is the story moving? How far to that wall over there? Everything turned on decisions like that. It was not addictive. That was what people said, who didn’t know anything about it. Addiction was not what it felt like, because it didn’t feel crazy or out of control. It was about the conviction that a certain kind of experience gave you, or at least what he felt when he and Jacek were assessing the same risk. They just knew. If there was any intoxication in what they did, it was
this knowledge, the accumulated experience of two old dogs who had done all their hunting together. Jacek looked the part: the gait, the long nose, the watchfulness, the way he cocked his head when he listened. But all this self-confident knowledge had just evaporated. From now on Charlie wasn’t sure of anything. His hands weren’t shaking. But they would. He had picked up a tremor, he was sure of it. All the old bastards got it sooner or later. Now it was his turn.

  They started out from the dug-out just as the sun set. It was two hours back to the top, more or less, but they only went a hundred yards before they had to take cover. The firing started and they thought it was aimed at them. You always do. But it wasn’t. Nothing was coming through the trees. They were perfectly safe. It was down in the village.

  The half-tracks, four of them, had returned and the squads were smashing down the doors, pulling the men out into the road, while others were tossing lighted brands inside. Jacek and Charlie watched from the trees while the lead half-track clanked to a stop in front of the house where they had been hidden. The turret swivelled, the gun moving back and forward across the whitewashed stones, the red tiled roof, the garden on the side where the woman and her father had been putting in a spring planting, even tying up an aluminum pie tin on a pole to scare away the birds.

  The three of them, in blue-black body armour, went through the front door, and five hundred yards away in the cover of the pines, you could hear the sound of wood being smashed, glass splintering and a scream, muffled through the walls, but so distinct, so piercing, so lonely. You had your face in the dirt and your hands over your ears.

  When Charlie looked up, a fourth one in body armour was out of the half-track carrying the jerry-can to the door.

  The village boys in the dug-out could have started shooting, but it would have drawn fire, and they were no match for the half-tracks. So they just sat there, as stunned as Charlie and Jacek. She was out in the road by then, running towards the commander, shouting.

  Charlie was pacing the hotel room now, and the towel had slipped off his waist. He was naked but for the bandages on his hand, not caring about being ridiculous, he was back there, really back there, with the story inside him needing to be pulled out, like some infected splinter. She watched from the bed.

  One member of the squad with a jerry-can was sloshing down the door-frames and windows, the garden fence, the plants, the grassy path to the door. She was screaming at the commander, fists raised, when the gasoline arced over her and the lighter touched her hem. She went up with her house, an orange-black spinnaker of flame catching the wind. Jacek began to turn over, whispering as he stared down the viewfinder, mouthing Polish prayers.

  She was running along the road towards them, while the commander watched her go, and stayed the mercy of an executioner’s bullet. Then he climbed into the half-track, reversing hard and turning around to finish the operation.

  That was when the torpor of fear ended and you broke cover and stepped into the road. As she ran, her arms were like wings of flame, and she blundered into you in an embrace of fire – and you were both down, in the dusty road, rolling over and over.

  They had ten minutes maybe, before the patrol came back. The village boys might cover them, might not. You remembered pulling her off and sitting up, looking at your hands and then at her, legs and lower body intact, but shoulders and upper arms charred and that terrible place across the top of her back. Jacek had his water bottle out and poured it across her shoulders and she cried out.

  Only Jacek had instincts you could trust. Benny was shaking, and talking to himself, and Jacek told him to get her up if she could walk, which she could, and get her into the trees. She did not look back at the burning house. Her father was in there, but it was too late.

  He remembered Jacek taking Benny by the shoulders and shaking him and saying: we are taking her. When Benny said they couldn’t, Jacek told him to shut up. And then they poured water down her throat and down her back, and she said nothing, and seemed to feel nothing, and fell, and Benny and Jacek picked her up and carried her most of the way, and she astonished them by walking ahead of them, like a possessed spirit, the final mile to the edge of the plateau where, reaching safety, she buckled again. Behind came Charlie stumbling and falling, reaching out to the trees and crying out when his singed hands rasped against the bark. And all along the road, they had one thought: it will be all right if we can get her to the other side. And then it was: it will be all right if we can get her into the chopper. And then it was: it will be all right if we …

  He was now standing in the middle of the hotel room, looking at his hands. Weak light came through the windows and the sound of rain.

  ‘What am I doing here?’

  He was crying, ignominious and naked, waving his useless hands to and fro, as if he thought this would take the burning away.

  ‘What am I doing?’

  Etta came to him and stood there in front of him. Then she undid her robe and he stepped closer and she folded him in. She said nothing, just held him and he held her with the weight of his wrists against her shoulders and his bandaged palms out a fraction from her body. They stood like that for a long time.

  THREE

  He began to shiver so she put him into bed and covered him up, his bandaged hands out flat on his chest. She went to the bathroom and when she came back some minutes later he was asleep, mouth open, looking old and vulnerable. She lay down beside him and watched him sleep, then slept herself, then woke and in the warmth of the bed and his body next to hers, she kissed him. The bedside light was still on, and she saw his eyes open as her lips came down on his. He reached for her, but she laughed softly and pushed his hand away and said, ‘Let me.’

  She came down astride him and held his hands back against the pillows so he would not be tempted to help. As she made love to him, there was guileless candour in his eyes. It astonished them both that this was possible, after what had happened to him, and as the known yet unquenchable pleasure rose within her, Etta felt that the rain-bounded night was lifting and that the room’s confines had suddenly opened out on to a future together. She knew a lot about hope, and she knew how to keep it under control, but just then it was seductive.

  When Charlie woke a few hours later she was sitting in the chair on the other side of the room, holding a cup of tea and looking out the window. He lay watching her. The scent of her body was on his skin and in the sheets. With men, like with Jacek, you could tell what they were thinking. But with women, you never knew. He was thinking – where the hell do we go from here? – but right away, he knew that she was not. She came over, sat on the edge of the bed, gave him some of her tea and when he seemed fully awake, Etta said, ‘How did you leave her?’

  On a slab in the surgical tent, exposed, alone, de nuded. Then rolled off the slab into a body bag and then … Jesus. He reached for the phone but she got there first and dialled the hospital and held the phone to his ear while he sat up in bed.

  The male duty nurse on the 6th Navy hospital switchboard told Charlie that the female civilian, not having any next of kin, had been incinerated. He corrected himself, had been cremated. And the ashes? Charlie wanted to know. These were operational details. Charlie replied that they weren’t goddamned operational details. The woman was … and here he faltered, choosing between alternatives, none of which were satisfactory – she is my kin, she is my friend and so on –, settling on ‘I was with her when she died’, which hadn’t been true either. The duty nurse said he under stood, sir, and he was sorry, but there was nothing he could do about it, because the ashes had already been disposed of. Charlie began shouting that this wasn’t the fucking point, the fucking point was – at which Etta put the phone down.

  Charlie was striding around the hotel room, shouting that they hadn’t even kept her ashes or effects, such as they were: a carbonised dress, one shoe, possibly an earring or a ring, though he couldn’t remember whether she had been wearing any jewellery. Etta said she doubted there would have been
any, but Charlie didn’t seem to be listening. Whatever there had once been, it was all disposed of. He was working himself up into a tirade, and she knew what these were like. When Shandler had told him the assignment to Kabul was going to someone else, he had stormed back to his office, picked up a full glass bottle of Perrier and hurled it at the dartboard hanging on the back of his office door. She came and stood in the doorway and told him to stop being a child and he had laughed and kicked the glass at his feet back in her direction. Now he was striding around the room, declaiming at the thoughtless horror of modern life – those black plastic body bags, the industrial incinerators for human beings, the stainless steel sluice bays, the rubber gloves, the whole infernal machinery in which a human being was reduced to nothingness – when she said that he should get dressed and stop talking.

  He did so silently, feeling as if he had just been slapped. She put a shirt over his shoulders, pulled his hands through the sleeves, fastened the buttons. As she handed him his underpants and trousers, and steadied him as he put them on, she smiled at him to lighten him up, trying to get him to remember that there had been happiness just the other side of sleep, and that they must not lose it. But from his hooded, dogged look she knew that he was somewhere else. He was watching the woman go through those twin plastic flanges at the end of the tented corridor where the surgeons worked and she had never come out again, and here he was realising – he now said with absurd vehemence – that he hadn’t given her a proper Christian burial. Except, Etta added quietly, that she wasn’t Christian and they didn’t even know her name.