Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [61]
“Does that mean you’ll do it?”
He answered with a question. “What kind of jewels were in the handle of the knife?”
Oh, God, she thought, what is the correct answer supposed to be? She thought to say “Emeralds,” but they were associated with the Five Lions Valley, so it might imply that Ismael had been killed by a traitor in the Valley. “Rubies,” she said.
He nodded slowly. “Did Ismael not speak to you?”
“He seemed to be trying to speak, but unable to.”
He nodded again, and Jane thought: Come on, make up your bloody mind. At last he said: “The omen is clear. The convoy must be diverted.”
Thank God for that, thought Jane. “I’m so relieved,” she said truthfully. “I didn’t know what to do. Now I can be sure Ahmed will be saved.” She wondered what she could do to nail Mohammed down and make it impossible for him to change his mind. She could not make him swear an oath. She wondered whether to shake his hand. Finally she decided to seal his promise with an even older gesture: she leaned forward and kissed his mouth, quickly but softly, not giving him a chance either to refuse or to respond. “Thank you!” she said. “I know you are a man of your word.” She stood up. Leaving him seated, looking a little dazed, she turned and ran up the path toward the caves.
At the top of the rise she stopped and looked back. Mohammed was striding down the hill, already some distance from the bombed cottage, his head high and his arms swinging. He got a big charge from that kiss, Jane thought. I should be ashamed. I played on his superstition, his vanity and his sexuality. As a feminist I ought not to exploit his preconceptions—psychic woman, submissive woman, coquettish woman—to manipulate him. But it worked. It worked!
She walked on. Next she had to deal with Jean-Pierre. He would be home around dusk: he would have waited until midafternoon, when the sun was a little less hot, before starting on his journey, just as Mohammed had. She felt that Jean-Pierre would be easier to handle than Mohammed had been. For one thing, she could tell the truth with Jean-Pierre. For another, he was in the wrong.
She reached the caves. The little encampment was busy now. A flight of Russian jets soared across the sky. Everyone stopped work to watch them, although they were too high and too far away for bombing. When they had gone the small boys stuck out their arms like wings and ran around making jet-engine sounds. In their imaginary flights, Jane wondered, who were they bombing?
She went into the cave, checked on Chantal, smiled at Fara and took out the journal. Both she and Jean-Pierre wrote in it almost every day. It was primarily a medical record, and they would take it back to Europe with them for the benefit of others who would follow them to Afghanistan. They had been encouraged to record personal feelings and problems, too, so that others would know what to expect; and Jane had written quite full notes on her pregnancy and the birth of Chantal; but it was a highly censored account of her emotional life that had been logged.
She sat with her back to the cave wall and the book on her knee, and wrote the story of the eighteen-year-old boy who had died of allergic shock. It made her feel sad but not depressed—a healthy reaction, she told herself.
She added brief details of today’s minor cases; then, idly, she leafed backward through the volume. The entries in Jean-Pierre’s slapdash, spidery handwriting were highly abbreviated, consisting almost entirely of symptoms, diagnoses, treatments and results: Worms, he would write, or Malaria; then Cured or Stable or sometimes Died. Jane tended to write sentences such as She felt better this morning or The mother has tuberculosis. She read about the early days of her pregnancy, sore nipples and thickening thighs and nausea in the morning. She was interested to see that almost a year ago she had written I’m frightened of Abdullah. She had forgotten that.
She put the journal away. She and Fara spent the next couple of hours cleaning and tidying up the cave clinic; then it was time to go down