Charlie Johnson in the Flames

by Michael Ignatieff

  From the way Etta fitted the coat on his back and took him outside into the rain-washed April air, it was clear that she was treating him like a convalescent lunatic. He submitted with dull ill grace, following her to a lugubrious café where they both had a coffee. He sat in a corner booth staring out through the smeared window at the people in the street. She had the antibiotics and the painkillers the Navy had given him in her purse, and she counted one of each out into her hand and made him swallow them with his coffee.

  He found himself wondering what Annie was doing at this hour. With the time difference, she would be in assembly, though since he had never been there, not being one of those perfect fathers, he didn’t know what the assembly hall would be like. He seemed to remember her saying that they had prayers. What prayers? he had asked her, and Annie, using the voice she reserved for her father’s dumber questions, had said they were about God and loving people and so on. Thinking about Annie filled him with a sense of weightlessness, as if he was coming untethered. He wanted to talk to Etta about this. Wasn’t the feeling of fatherhood supposed to tie you down in this world, give you a sense of belonging to someone? He asked her whether she had ever had any children and she said she hadn’t. Why not? Charlie asked, and she said it had just never happened, not wanting to go into the marriage to the German businessman that had got her safely out of her small town at nineteen or the later relationship that brought her to London and eventually to Charlie’s office, by this time on her own. Do you miss it? Charlie asked, and she said, Miss what? Having children wasn’t essential, it wasn’t an answer for anything, still less a way to belong to the world and be at home there. She didn’t say all of this, but enough so that Charlie said that he was going to resent all of her wisdom pretty soon.

  ‘God,’ she said, ‘you have a gift for misery,’ suddenly angry that he should be squandering simple happiness. But he looked so depressed when she had said it that she touched the top of his hands and held the pressure there, as if to keep him from sinking any lower. She pulled him up by his elbows and walked him out to the street. She stuck her arm in his and swung her other one free and tried to get him to shed his mood.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ he wanted to know. ‘Ever been here before?’

  She hadn’t but she knew what she was looking for. She led the way with a certainty of purpose which belied the fact that she was actually lost. ‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked again, irritably.

  ‘We must do something for her,’ she said.

  The church she found was a dark, peeling, neglected place apparently inhabited only by mice, bats, and old women moving between the candle-stands in front of the saints’ pictures, snuffing out dying flames between their fingers. ‘Are you religious?’ he asked her but she ignored him.

  Saint Agnes, Saint Cecile and Saint Catherine stared down at Charlie from the damp walls, oily and lachrymose renderings in smoke-dulled colours, and he felt a keen urge to leave in search of a bar, but she had him firmly by the arm, and they went to a crone dozing by the candle-stands and bought two candles, and she took him into one of the alcoves, heavy with the odour of candle-wax and soot and damp. She lit the candles and then she sat down on a rickety chair and he did too and they watched the two candles, taller than the rest, flicker and burn. All of this – even if renounced – remained in her past somewhere, and it seemed good to him that her instincts would lead her back here. He knew it was sentimental to feel comforted by conso lations in which he did not believe, and he did not feel comforted exactly, rather informed, one more layer at a time, about who she was. The agitation in him was stilled, unexpectedly, and he sat beside her and then felt dumb sadness steal over him like the damp.

  One candle was for her, the woman he tried to save but couldn’t, the woman who never should have died, but did. Who was the other candle for? A blues stole into his head, the one about the two lights on the last car of a receding freight train down a long line of track:

  The blue light was my baby

  And the red light was my mind

  In the street outside the church, she said she would take him back to London.

  ‘So I need taking?’

  ‘Look at yourself,’ she said.

  ‘How?’ he said with a hard smile, turning in the street, his hands outstretched, while shoppers eddied around him, eyeing him with indifferent curiosity.

  ‘I’ll tell you then,’ she said. ‘You look half dead and need a week at home in bed.’

  ‘I don’t want to know. How about a drink?’ Charlie was looking around for a bar, with an empty, restless look in his eyes.

  ‘I’m on the flight today and so are you,’ she said.

  ‘Go without me,’ he replied, looking at her straight.

  She had come to take him home. He was in no state to be wandering, and she was not here for an adventure. She didn’t care about his wife and child; it was just that she didn’t want to collude in folly and end up making him worse than he was. That was when – looking at him in the street, unkempt and surly – she felt she had had enough. When he was like this, with the hard look in his eye, she knew she was powerless to stop him sweeping everything away, all the strands they had weaved together between them in the night, like a man pushing a cobweb off his face.

  ‘I can’t stand you like this,’ she said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Just looking for a way to do yourself more harm.’

  ‘Etta.’ He tried to take her hands, but she wouldn’t let him.

  He tried again. ‘Stay.’

  ‘Charlie, go home. See your child. See your wife. Sort yourself out. Then we’ll see. You need to be in bed, and I don’t want to play nurse.’

  ‘I don’t want a nurse.’

  ‘You did, and now you don’t know what you want so I can’t help you any more.’ She opened her purse, took out his pills and stuffed them into the pocket of his coat.

  ‘Come on, baby.’

  She shook her head and turned quickly before he could pull her back. He watched her until she had disappeared round a corner.

  That was quick, he thought. She was nothing if not efficient and she was definitely not his baby.

  He drank some of the local plum brandy in the nearest bar and when he returned to the hotel, she had checked out. He sat on the unmade bed, feeling pathetic and disliking himself for it. There ought to have been a note, he thought sourly. That’s how these things should be done. So he turned over the pillows and then opened the drawers of the bedside table. His hands hurt but he even shook the Gideon Bible. But there was no note. He sat still for a moment, feeling the bad weather inside him, wondering who would change the bandages on his hands.

  The phone rang twenty times before Jacek picked it up. ‘I was feeding my animals,’ he said.

  ‘She didn’t make it,’ Charlie said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What the hell were we thinking?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How did you get back?’

  ‘We drove.’ North up the coast, Charlie knew, where they dropped the Jeep and then a flight home.

  ‘And Benny?’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about Benny.’

  When Charlie asked whether he could fly out there and stay a few days, Jacek said he had better check with Magda. The phone went down and Charlie sat there listening to the silence in Jacek’s world. Then he came back on and said that Magda thought he should go home to Elizabeth first.

  Elizabeth. The mention of her name was cold and clarifying. In his mind’s eye, he saw her make that familiar gesture of tossing her hair to get it clear when she picked up her flute, turned her eye to the music and began to play. He had seen her do it all their life together, and now for the first time, he realised that she was looking at the music, not at him, never at him. He knew this was a dreary and self-pitying thought – that she had eyes for the music, not for him – but there it was.

  How could he explain to Elizabeth what had happened? How could
she possibly understand? She was a good woman, and she had been a tender one, so he couldn’t walk around pretending he was misunderstood or neglected or whatever it was that other whining hacks liked to say. He had no complaints. It was just that he needed asylum, and the peculiar feature of his home was that it had never offered asylum. Charlie felt impressed, as if a nagging puzzle in a former life had become clear.

  ‘Come on, Jacek, let me come and feed the pigs,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll go home. I promise.’

  ‘Go home first, Charlie. Magda is right.’

  ‘Everybody says I should go home. Why is that?’ Charlie asked.

  Jacek let that pass. He never bothered replying to Charlie’s rhetorical questions. It was one of the best things of their friendship. Another good thing was that when Charlie wanted something bad enough, Jacek knew it was a waste of time to persuade him otherwise. So he said they could feed the pigs together.

  At the airport, everyone treated him well. It was because his hands were bandaged. People held doors open for him. They carried his shoulder bag. He should do this more often, he thought, except that his palms had started to hurt and he wanted to tear off the bandages and scratch. There were only two foreign gates in the airport and the London flight was still boarding, and he suddenly found himself hurrying in the direction of that one, but Etta wasn’t in the line of those waiting to board, she must already be in her seat. He couldn’t call her back, and anyway he didn’t know what to say, so he stood by the glass and watched the plane pull back from the stand. Waving would have been stupid, but that was what he wanted to do.

  His flight was full and they had him wedged in the middle seat. There was a girl next to him, with an acrid smell about her, and a dozing old lady in the window seat. The girl poured his vodkas for him, because the three little bottles were too much for his hands, and she smiled at him, but they had no common language and so Charlie only had vodka for company, his elbows pinned to his side, knees bumping the seat in front and the headrest burrowing into his fifth cervical disc. He knew it was the fifth cervical because that was where the surgeon had gone in twenty years before. He had a scar to prove it, indeed the only scar on his body. In a morgue it would be what a cop would call a visible distinguishing mark, the way he might still be identified if the rest of him was unrecognisable. Charlie knew that this was a bad train of thought, but short of more vodka, he was stuck with it.

  He must have dozed off because when he awoke there was food on the passengers’ tray tables on either side of him and the stewardess and the cart were somewhere behind. His vodka bottles were gone too so he sat and felt his hands aching. The girl was eating her way through her salad and then lifted the foil off the hot portion of the meal. It was grilled beef with some kind of a sauce, the meat red, moist and streaked with carbonisation. Charlie shut his eyes, but the smell would not let him go. The plane began bucking and the seatbelt sign came on. The smell of the meat was everywhere. He had to get up. Now. Charlie clambered over the girl, grimacing as his hands clutched at the back of her seat, while she let out a cry and grabbed her tray. They were still serving in the aisle, but he pushed by, and though one of the stewardesses tried to stop him, telling him to return to his seat, Charlie got by her and made it safely to the toilet at the back, where he locked himself in and then fell down on his knees. So that was how, in a Polish airliner, with a stewardess banging on the door, and Charlie on his knees, holding the toilet seat with bandaged hands, vomiting into the bowl, he was revisited for the first time, though not for the last, by the sight and smell of the carbonised flesh on the burning woman’s back.

  FOUR

  When he caught sight of Jacek watching him come down the ramp, Charlie knew he must be looking terrible, but since Jacek had often seen Charlie looking terrible, he didn’t say anything, just took the bag off his shoulder and led him to the car. Charlie half expected a Saab or something fancy, since he assumed that all those freelance dollars would have made him a Polish millionaire, but it was an old Lada, and it smelt of dog, and Jacek took the windshield wipers out of the glove compartment and fitted them back on and Charlie felt they were back in the 1980s, when he and Jacek had first met.

  December 1981 in Warsaw to be exact. General Jaruzelski, the one behind the deadly shades, had declared a state of emergency. Charlie and his crew were there filming as the police turned fire-hoses on the crowd and the water jet caught a woman coming out of a doorway and began spinning her around, drenched and frozen, her handbag ripped out of her hands by the water jet and then falling so that her legs, tights and underwear were visible and the hose man was sweeping her up and down the sidewalk, like a piece of trash being driven down a drain. Fantastic footage is what he thought at the time, the ignoble character of it only striking him later when he watched it back at the bureau. He was debating how much closer his crew should go in, when he caught his first sight of Jacek, a blurred presence at his side, a snapper in a leather jacket photographing the woman skittering about on the pavement, struggling to get up, then being knocked down again, while a sodden crowd watched unable to help her. Jacek edged closer and suddenly he had a garbage can gripped between his hands over his head and was hurling it at the man with the hose, who caught the full force of it and toppled backwards against the water truck. The hose came loose and its brass head began flailing about on the ground. While another cop rushed to turn it off the woman had time to get to her feet and disappear into the crowd, and then the police charged from across the square and they got Jacek and all Charlie could see were their batons coming down in a tight circle around him. When Charlie moved in and began filming the beating, the batons came his way too, and so he ended up in a military hospital, with a cut on his head, explaining himself and waiting to be deported. But not before he had seen Jacek in the same hospital, on a gurney in his sodden jeans and leather jacket, hands on his chest like some medieval tomb sculpture and a serene expression on his face below a large white bloody bandage. He turned to Charlie and gave him a nod of recognition as they took him away.

  He did eighteen months for the trick with the garbage can and when Charlie next saw him it was nine years later at a Solidarity meeting in Gdansk shipyard. Jacek was leaning against the back wall of a union hall, ignoring the talk, which never interested him much, and snapping the factory women in smocks who brought the vodka into the meeting without the big guys ever noticing that they were there. He was a good snapper, but it didn’t take much for Charlie to persuade him to, as he put it, go into motion pictures. From then on, they were inseparable: Slovenia, summer 1991; Novska and Pakrac, October 1991; Sarajevo, Christmas 1992; Mostar, summer 1993; and on and on: Mogadishu, Luanda and Huambo, Kabul, all the assign ments lined up in his mind like so many rows of tape. They were holidays from hell every one of them, and Jacek seemed to survive them by keeping everything contained within the black frame of his viewfinder. It was often all Jacek would say about a bad situation: ‘Look,’ he would say, having framed up, and then he would gesture at the machine, and Charlie would look through into the digital world and think: Yes, it looks like something when Jacek frames it up. I can deal with this. They’d seen the world together, though they’d seen it too close to know what it really meant. Some times they both felt like spectators at a terrible and violent play. Sure, they wanted to go on stage and stop it. But these plays couldn’t be stopped.

  The worst thing was that their experience got blurred, lost definition, one bad play shading into the next. Everybody said they had interesting lives, which was true, and it seemed pretty stupid to complain, but after a while it just became a series of assignments, a set of stories you told when you got home but which left you with a feeling that their reality had escaped you. ‘We suffer from too much experience,’ Jacek said once. ‘We have more than we know what to do with.’ Which was why Jacek began turning down assignments and would disappear to the farm and his pigs, and nobody could reach him. He managed his exposure a lot better than Charlie, and, altogether, he was sa
ner.

  Charlie was thinking all this as they hit the four-lane and the windshield wipers came on, and Jacek said nothing and the big German rigs kept passing and slewing rain on to the car with a thump which made the Lada shake. He had no idea where they were going other than it was bound to be the farm but almost anything seemed fine, and Charlie fell asleep in his coat.

  It was too dark to see much when they arrived, bucking and weaving along a dirt track, the Lada’s head lights playing over the tops of dark wet furrows. It was all new to him, and he realised that never having met Magda before, he had simply presumed that they would both have to take him in. He was asking people to make a lot of allowances, Etta and now these two, and he didn’t like what it said about his state of mind, his eerie helplessness. Charlie was going to say all this, but it was too late, for the lights picked out the barn and the white house and now they rolled up to the gravel in front of the door and there in the open doorway, leading back into the kitchen, stood Jacek’s wife.

  Her hair was up, and she was wearing jeans and what looked like one of Jacek’s checked shirts and a pair of white socks on her feet. She had glasses on the end of her nose and she had been cooking. Early forties, he thought. All Jacek ever said about her was that she trans lated books for a living, ran the farm and was, as he put it once, with fine philosophical precision, ‘the principle of my existence’. The minute he saw her Charlie felt bad, for she looked at him with the same appraising look as Etta, only Etta was probably back in London by now and wouldn’t want to see him again. Charlie stood there in the kitchen, mute with longing.