Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [41]
Jane’s skin dried almost immediately in the warm, dusty air. It was now the height of summer, and every day was long, dry and hot. The good weather would last a month or two longer, and then for the rest of the year it would be bitterly cold.
Zahara was still interested in yesterday’s topic of conversation. She stopped rubbing her hair for a moment to say: “Whatever anyone says, the way to get pregnant is to Do It every day.”
There was agreement from Halima, the sullen, dark-eyed wife of Mohammed Khan. “And the only way not to get pregnant is never to Do It.” She had four children, but only one of them—Mousa—was a boy, and she had been disappointed to learn that Jane knew of no way to improve one’s chances of having a boy.
Zahara said: “But then, what do you say to your husband when he comes home after six weeks with a convoy?”
Jane said: “Be like the mullah’s wife, and put it in the wrong hole.”
Zahara roared with laughter. Jane smiled. That was a birth control technique which had not been mentioned in her crash courses in Paris, but it was clear that modern methods would not arrive in the Five Lions Valley for many years yet, so traditional means would have to serve—helped, perhaps, by a little education.
The talk turned to the harvest. The Valley was a sea of golden wheat and bearded barley, but much of it would rot in the fields, for the young men were away fighting most of the time and the older ones found it slow work reaping by moonlight. Toward the end of the summer all the families would add up their sacks of flour and baskets of dried fruit, look at their chickens and goats, and count their pennies; and they would contemplate the coming shortages of eggs and meat, and hazard a guess at this winter’s prices for rice and yogurt; and some of them would pack a few precious possessions and make the long trek across the mountains to set up new homes in the refugee camps of Pakistan, as the shopkeeper had, along with millions of other Afghans.
Jane feared that the Russians would make this evacuation their policy—that, unable to defeat the guerrillas, they would try to destroy the communities within which the guerrillas lived, as the Americans had in Vietnam, by carpet bombing whole areas of the countryside, so that the Five Lions Valley would become an uninhabited wasteland, and Mohammed and Zahara and Rabia would join the homeless, stateless, aimless occupants of the camps. The rebels could not begin to resist an all-out blitzkrieg, for they had virtually no antiaircraft weapons.
It was getting dark. The women began to drift back to the village. Jane walked with Zahara, half listening to the talk and thinking about Chantal. Her feelings about the baby had gone through several stages. Immediately after the birth she had felt exhilarated by relief, triumph and joy, at having produced a living, perfect baby. When the reaction set in she had felt utterly miserable. She had not known how to look after a baby, and contrary to what people said, she had no instinctive knowledge at all. She had been frightened of the baby. There had been no gush of maternal love. Instead she had suffered weird and terrifying dreams and fantasies in which the baby died—dropped in the river, or killed by a bomb, or stolen away in the night by the snow tiger. She still had not told Jean-Pierre about these thoughts in case he should think her mad.
There had been conflicts with her midwife, Rabia Gul. She said women should not breast-feed for the first three days, because what came out was not milk.