Charlie Johnson in the Flames

by Michael Ignatieff

  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.

  ‘Nobody makes us Mr Memory,’ Charlie said. ‘We do it to ourselves.’

  He got Jacek to drive him to the airport the next day. Outside the house, he held Magda tightly between his still-bandaged hands and as he got into the car he felt that he had done well to restrain more effusive displays. Actually, he had been pretty effusive. What he said to her, very close, was that she had been good to a stranger, and she replied that he had never been a stranger. With that, she kissed him, a little peck right on his lips, and he got into the car feeling happy.

  The road was bare and dry between ploughed fields and Jacek said almost nothing till they were at the airport. ‘So we go out again or what?’ he asked when the car was at the ramp in front of departures.

  ‘I want to go to Belgrade,’ Charlie said.

  ‘And kill that son of a bitch?’ Jacek said with his usual wry lack of affect, opening the door of the Lada and giving Charlie a gentle push to help him up. It was one of Jacek’s better moves, Charlie thought later as the plane lifted off for London, giving words to a thought that had been in both of their minds, just beneath the level of awareness, from the second they had seen that lighter applied to the hem of that dress.

  Yes, kill that son of a bitch.

  SIX

  When he got to his front door, he opened it with his key and stood in the hall and put his bag down. He went into the sitting room on the left with the floor to ceiling bookshelves the length of the far wall. He could see the rows of Mika’s books, the ones with the Russian titles on the spines that he hadn’t the heart to throw away when he cleared out the house in Dedham and that he kept promising himself he’d learn how to read one day. There were Frank’s too, one row above, the stout-hearted memoirs of battle, and a couple of ones – Home Carpenters’ Almanac, for example – that Charlie had salvaged from the garage. By the television stood the rows of Charlie’s video tapes and next to the stereo system his blues and country and western: fifteen separate Johnny Cash. ‘I shot a ma
n in Reno,’ Charlie said to himself, ‘just to watch him die.’

  In the middle of the room, placed so that it faced the bay window and had a good view of the street, was the music stand and Elizabeth’s flute. He could see she was still working on the Haydn, because the music was on the stand. He’d been away for a month.

  ‘Charlie?’ She was on the top step of the landing looking down at him standing in the hall. He nodded and she came down slowly, drying her hands on her apron. She was wearing the black dress, and her hair was up. She had the long silver earrings on that brought out the fine shape of her neck.

  ‘You going to a party?’ he asked.

  ‘Rae and Barbara are coming over. I’m cooking. Life goes on Charlie,’ she said, reaching the bottom step.

  ‘Where’s Annie?’

  ‘At the Duggans. On a sleep-over.’

  He followed her through the living room into the kitchen at the back. The table, by the sliding door out into the garden, was set for three. He watched as she set a fourth place.

  ‘Why the beard?’ she asked, and he said that he hadn’t been able to hold a razor, but now he could and later he would go upstairs and get rid of it.

  He went over to the cupboard, took out the single malt he knew was there and got a glass, then corrected himself, took out two and sat down at the table, still in his coat, and tried to get the cork out of the bottle. She watched him and came over and took it out of his hands and poured two inches for him.

  ‘You too,’ he said and she did as he asked. She drank the whisky, with a grimace, straight down, but she didn’t sit with him. She went back to her cooking, and he sat there watching her back. She had good legs, like her mother, firm calves and a nice taper down to the ankle.

  ‘You can’t get away with not talking,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘You did that before and you can’t do it this time.’ She was right, of course. He did have a habit of shutting everything down when he didn’t know what to think or feel. He would just go mute and there had been times in their marriage when it went on for days, for example at the end of that thing with whatever her name was. Re-entry was always hell. He felt like a diver, having to come up slowly, fifteen feet at a time, with the wobbly blue sky so far away above him and never getting any closer. The best way was just to take it easy, letting the surroundings go to work on you. He sat by the table and looked about him, remembering when the wall had stopped there and they had knocked it through to make the kitchen bigger. The history of the room, and the house in which it stood, was reeling him in, and so were the cooking smells on the stove. She was doing that thing with chicken and vegetables that started on the burners and ended up in the oven and came out tasting of paprika and pepper.

  He should stay: his father had, his mother had. Look where it got them. No really, look where it got them, faithful to the end, Mika holding Frank’s head in her arms on the garage floor, saying Russian prayers over him. Or so she said. He hadn’t been there. He had been here. In this house when his dad died, an ocean away, in theirs. He drank, cupping the glass with two bandaged hands and looked at her and knew he had to say something.

  ‘If the office hadn’t phoned,’ she said.

  ‘I just couldn’t.’

  ‘Don’t do this to us.’

  ‘I’m not doing anything.’

  She let that pass. ‘What happened?’ It wasn’t that she didn’t know. She must have made ten calls to Jacek and Magda. She would have had the gist from them and from the office. But she wanted to hear it from him. He owed it to her.

  ‘We got caught in an ambush and a girl got killed.’

  ‘I saw the footage, Charlie. She was burning.’ She had her back to the stove and she was vehement and angry, because it made her sick to think he was fobbing her off. But it was all that he could get out of his throat. He was trying to understand why it was that when you told a story, once, for good – in this case to Etta – it all dried up inside you when you were ordered to tell it again.

  ‘Come on, Charlie. Tell me.’ She never begged.

  ‘I got burned. I was trying to put her out.’

  ‘Oh Charlie, Jesus Christ, if only you’d rung us,’ she said, in a voice full of pain for him, and for them. He could tell she was doing the best she could. She was trying. He could tell from the catch in her voice.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You need to see a doctor.’ She stayed with her back to the kitchen surfaces, but her hands made a gesture towards him.

  ‘My hands are fine. Really. Want to see?’

  ‘I don’t mean your hands.’

  It cut him to hear her say that. She was the one he had the history with, and whatever else was wrong, she knew him well.

  ‘I don’t need a doctor.’

  She shook her head and bent so that her hair came down over her face, as if she wanted to hide from the sight of him for a moment. Then she straightened, turned her back and steadied a lemon on the chopping board to slice it.

  ‘They got burned. But they’re fine.’

  She began stirring something in a cup. She was making salad dressing. He could smell the lemon. ‘Why Jacek rather than me?’ Her back stayed turned.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  He really didn’t, now that he was here. He could say Jacek had been through it all with him and she hadn’t. He could say, though she would have thrown the salad dressing at him, that it was a guy thing, needing the comfort of a man, although that was actually part of the truth. Nothing was clear now, because he could see all that he had spurned by not coming home and how much of him was here between these four walls. Everything was rooting him to the spot and taking away the power of speech. There was the fact that he knew the name of the village in northern Italy, and could even see that tiny, neat as a pin shop where he had stood outside, too big and clumsy to be allowed in, while she sat inside buying the glasses that she had put by every place on the table where he was nursing his drink. He knew why she set a table like this, when it was only for Barbara and Rae, two friends of hers from work, why she dressed up. It was what her mother did. He knew the exact components of her salad dressing – garlic, Dijon, salt, pepper, one part lemon to two parts olive oil – because it was her dad’s recipe. The weight of all these facts crushed down on his chest. But he said nothing and she just shook her head again and gave the lemon a hard squeeze.

  He knew he ought to be taking control of the situation and steering them both in the right direction. He knew what that direction was too – it should all end with him putting out his hand and saying he wanted to go to bed, and she would take it and help him off with his coat and take him upstairs. And then he would throw his clothes on the chair and lie down in the bed and she would come and they would lie side by side and after much effort of will he would reach over and put his arm around her and with more effort of will he would say he was sorry for not having been able to phone or give her any indication of where he had been. He could see the right path all right.

  ‘Go upstairs and shave,’ she said. ‘They’ll be here in ten minutes.’

  He did as he was told, finding his shaving things put away beneath the sink, and their place taken on the shelf below the mirror by her cleansers and pads. He lathered himself up, averting his eyes from the eyes that met him in the mirror, and cut himself a few times.

  When he looked, she was leaning against the door-frame, watching how his old face came up clean as the razor peeled away the whiskers. He just kept on going, watching her out of the corner of his eye, when he went on to treat his cuts with the styptic pencil.

  He spoke her name to the mirror. ‘Elizabeth.’ Liz Drew as was. Eldest daughter of Bart and Carla Drew of Norwood, Massachusetts. ‘You’re kidding,’ she said, and her face lit up, when they met for the first time at a party in London and he told her that he was from Dedham, just up Route 1A. After all these years, she was still the girl most likely to succeed. Age had not dimmed her. She was still smiling out of her graduation picture. Not now, of course, bu
t she could. He felt, in an absurd way, that it was to his credit that he hadn’t destroyed that in her.

  He could see Bart in that thick cardigan Carla knitted for him against the icy night air, sauntering down at Charlie’s side to the liquor store at the bottom of their road. They came back with enough stuff, as Bart put it happily, to launch a rocket to Mars, and they drank all of it. That was how Christmas should be, Carla said, when it was all over and he was on the floor beside her, picking that tree decoration stuff, the silver thread, out of the plush pile of her carpet.

  ‘Charlie.’ He could hear Elizabeth whisper his name in the dark woods behind her parents’ house, when they were side by side on the path amid the feathery snow, the year they got married.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Tell me,’ not there, not twenty-four, wrapped in a scarf against the cold, but here and forty-six, with her hair up and her earrings catching the light from the hall.

  ‘I don’t know about this thing with Rae and Barbara,’ he said.

  She had the wry look on her face. ‘My war correspondent husband,’ she began, ‘the guy who gets shot at for a living and he can’t hack dinner with Rae and Barbara. No kidding.’ She was trying to work one of the better routines from the happy time, her line in comic scorn. It had actually been a bond. He was the useless one, she the one with the comic scorn. It had worked for years and years, and in deference to this, he managed a smile and followed her downstairs to dinner.

  It was hell all right. Rae and Barbara couldn’t leave it alone. They had seen the footage and they wanted to hear it all first hand, and he had to do his party trick, and he thought that if he had been hoping to regain some credit for good behaviour, he deserved some in the circumstances. But Elizabeth wasn’t handing out any medals.

  ‘Poor soul,’ Barbara said when he got to the part about how the burned woman went through the flanged plastic doors in the field hospital and didn’t come back. What was truly interesting, he thought, was how quickly the silence after that was filled with talk, how they went on to other things, as if he had said something embarrassing but unimportant. Elizabeth listened to him, angry no doubt that Rae and Barbara had got more out of him than she had. She stared at him across the glassware, her hand along the fine line of her jaw, her elbow resting on the table. Afterwards, as their talk eddied around how terrible the world was and how violent, and how did he do what he did, she let him twist in the wind for a while, he could tell, before she got up and cleared the dishes and then threw him an unexpected lifeline, by changing the subject. This left him free to sit there and drink that old red he had bought some time ago and listen to them talk about school.