Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [117]
She handed Chantal to Fara and examined Alishan quickly. He was badly bruised, but no bones were broken. “How did they beat you?” she asked him.
“With their rifles,” he answered hoarsely.
She nodded. He was lucky: the only real damage they had done was to subject him to the stress that was so bad for his heart, and he was already recovering from that. She dabbed iodine on his cuts and told him to lie where he was for an hour.
She returned to Abdullah. However, when the mullah saw her approach he waved her away with an angry roar. She knew what had infuriated him: he thought he was entitled to priority treatment, and he was insulted that she had seen Alishan first. Jane was not going to make excuses. She had told him before that she treated people in order of urgency, not status. Now she turned away. There was no point in insisting on examining the old fool. If he was well enough to yell at her, he would live.
She went to Shahazai, the scarred old fighter. He had already been examined by his sister Rabia, the midwife, who was bathing his cuts. Rabia’s herbal ointments were not quite as antiseptic as they should be, but Jane thought they probably did more good than harm on balance, so she contented herself with making him wiggle his fingers and toes. He was all right.
We were lucky, Jane thought. The Russians came, but we escaped with minor injuries. Thank God. Perhaps now we can hope they will leave us alone for a while—maybe until the route to the Khyber Pass is open again. . . .
“Is the doctor a Russian?” Rabia asked abruptly.
“No.” For the first time, Jane wondered just exactly what had been in Jean-Pierre’s mind. If he had found me, she thought, what would he have said to me? “No, Rabia, he’s not a Russian. But he seems to have joined their side.”
“So he is a traitor.”
“Yes, I suppose he is.” Now Jane wondered what was in old Rabia’s mind.
“Can a Christian divorce her husband for being a traitor?”
In Europe she can divorce him for a good deal less, thought Jane, so she said: “Yes.”
“Is this why you have now married the American?”
Jane saw how Rabia was thinking. Spending the night on the mountainside with Ellis had, indeed, confirmed Abdullah’s accusation that she was a Western whore. Rabia, who had long been Jane’s leading supporter in the village, was planning to counter that accusation with an alternative interpretation, according to which Jane had been rapidly divorced from the traitor under strange Christian laws unknown to True Believers and was now married to Ellis under those same laws. So be it, Jane thought. “Yes,” she said, “that is why I have married the American.”
Rabia nodded, satisfied.
Jane almost felt as if there were an element of truth in the mullah’s epithet. She had, after all, moved from one man’s bed to another’s with indecent rapidity. She felt a little ashamed, then caught herself: she had never let her behavior be ruled by other people’s expectations. Let them think what they like, she said to herself.
She did not consider herself married to Ellis. Do I feel divorced from Jean-Pierre? she asked herself. The answer was no. However, she did feel that her obligations to him had ended. After what he’s done, she thought, I don’t owe him anything. It should have come as some kind of relief to her, but in fact she just felt sad.
Her musings were interrupted. There was a flurry of activity over at the mosque entrance, and Jane turned around to see Ellis walk in carrying something in his arms. As he came nearer she could see that his face was a mask of rage, and it flashed through her mind that she had seen him like that once before: when a careless taxi driver had made a sudden U-turn and knocked down a young man on a motorcycle, injuring him quite badly. Ellis and Jane had witnessed the whole thing and called the ambulance—in those days she had known nothing of medicine—and Ellis had said over and over again: