“You know what I saw.” She found it hard to shape the words. “You saw it too.”
“No.” He took her hand quietly in his. “In that situation, no two people see exactly the same thing.”
She allowed herself to look at him then. She could see the fatigue in his much-loved face; she could see regret and resignation but also strength in his eyes. Whatever I have seen, she thought, he has seen worse—many, many times.
“Gini, it isn’t a cure, I’m not saying that.” His hand tightened around hers. “There is no cure. You know that. You live with me. Once that door’s unlocked, you can never close it again. There’s a divide, Gini, between people who’ve been through that doorway and those who have not. I warned you of this before.”
“I know you did.”
“But for us there’s no divide.” He drew her toward him. “Gini, don’t create one. Tell me, darling. Let me see what you saw.”
So Gini tried. She tracked it, that former municipal building, on the outskirts of Mostar, a place surrounded by the shells of buildings, a place that had, for the past two months, housed the city’s improvised hospital wards.
They had been in the long room reserved for the seriously injured. At one end were the soldiers, at the other, civilians. There were only a few children in this ward, and Gini, entering it, had been relieved. She had been interviewing a nurse, then one of the local doctors, who had been up all night operating on patients without benefit of anesthetic. She was joined by one of the volunteer doctors, a Frenchman Pascal knew from Médecins sans Frontières. With him had come a much-needed supply of painkillers and antibiotics. Gini helped him unpack these, then allowed him to lead her over to the end bed. He introduced her to the ten-year-old boy who lay there, for whom he had brought a chocolate bar. Both the boy’s parents had been killed two weeks before. The boy’s leg had been amputated at the knee; his right arm had sustained a minor shrapnel wound. By his bed crouched his seven-year-old sister, who refused to be parted from him. She was physically unhurt, but had spoken to no one except her brother for fourteen days.
Gini sat by the boy and talked to him, the French doctor translating. The pain and compassion she felt were so deep, they felt as eloquent as any language. The conversation faltered to an end; she hoped, passionately hoped, that this boy, with his thin face and dark, watchful eyes, would understand the concern for him she felt, even if that concern was useless and could bring him no ease.
Throughout the conversation the boy’s sister never once raised her head. She shivered continually; she clutched her brother’s hand. The doctor, seeing Gini’s expression, intervened. He said a few words, then drew her back down the length of the ward, and into a corridor beyond. In the distance, somewhere, as always, guns boomed. The doctor was thin, bearded, about five years younger than she was. He looked at her closely.
“How long have you been here?”
“Three months. Nearly four.”
“Then listen to me. That boy will survive. So will his sister. Now that we have penicillin, his wound will heal.”
Gini looked back over her shoulder. Pascal, his face grim, was moving toward the boy’s end of the ward. She said: “Survive? He has no parents. No home. He’s ten years old. You saw his eyes.”
She covered her face with her hands. The young doctor continued to watch her quietly.
“Nonetheless. He’ll survive. You cannot get emotionally involved—you do realize that, don’t you?” He hesitated. “I never ask their circumstances. I prefer not to know their names. I just make sure they get bandages, medication, because otherwise, they’ll die. That’s my function. Your function—”
“Mine?” Gini jerked up to look at him. She was crying, and no longer cared who saw the tears. “My function? What in God’s name is my function? I feel useless—worse than useless. I feel like a voyeur.”
“That’s predictable. It will pass.” He glanced away, some sound outside catching his attention. There was the noise of running footsteps, a shout, then quiet. Moving away from the window, the doctor took her arm.
“You have a function,” he said. “Ask Pascal. You elicit sympathy. Indignation.” He gave her a cool glance. “Then people write checks. Politicians feel pressured. And over here”—he glanced around again, frowning—“we get the mercy flights. The relief doctors. The supplies. That’s your function. To write. So do it. Describe this godforsaken place. Make people see it. Describe that child.”
“It’s not enough.” Gini began to turn away. “It’s inadequate. You know that.”
“You have a better suggestion? Can you nurse? You have a medical degree?”
He continued speaking, Gini thought for a fraction of a second after that, though she could not hear his words. Swinging back toward him, she saw his face change as the air went dark. Something warm, moving fast, brushed her skin, broke them apart, picked them up as if they were weightless, and tossed them to the ground. There was a long, slow, wallowing sound, then that deep, sucking exhalation she had come to fear. She could hear the crush of masonry falling, then silence, then running footsteps, then screams.
Thirty seconds? Sixty seconds? She groped her way across the corridor, crawled to the entrance to the ward. Dust billowed, curled into her throat and eyes, then slowly began to thin and settle. One section of the ward was missing. The three beds at the far end of it were missing. The boy she had been with not five minutes earlier was gone, and so was his sister. For one long, silent moment of stupefaction and agony, she thought: and so is Pascal.
She helped to clear that fallen masonry, clawing at the powdery stone; she knew enough by now to know there was very little hope, and Pascal, safe, uninjured, working beside her, also knew this. When it was clear to them both that no miracle had occurred, he rose, drew her to her feet, and led her away.
Lying on that bed in the hotel room, back in Sarajevo, she tried to spell this out to him. She wanted to say: why? Why did the two doctors survive, and the nurse, and the other patients, and you and I? Why could that boy not have been spared, the boy and his sister? In the end, that was all she could say: one last, long, impotent why.
Pascal waited until she had finished speaking. His arms tightened around her. He wiped the tears from her cheeks and kissed her closed eyes.
“Why? Because it’s random,” he said at last, quietly. “Because it’s always random and arbitrary. An old woman will be spared, a young child will die. A soldier who raped two women the previous day will survive, and some innocent bystander will not. Gini, don’t try to find shape and meaning in this. There is none.”
“There’s no God.” With a sudden furious gesture she rose from the bed and turned away. “No God. Cannot be. I see that now.”
“Not one that I would want to worship. No.” Pascal watched her in silence. She began to weep bitterly, burying her face in her hands.
“I want that boy back,” Pascal heard her say. She choked on her words. “I want—that doctor said he’d survive. Pascal…” She raised her face and swung around to look at him. “How can you bear this? How can you? How can you look at these things, year after year? I thought—if I steeled myself—I could—” She broke off and bent her head. “I can’t—I think… I can’t hope anymore.”
At that, Pascal rose and again took her in his arms. He waited until the storm of weeping ceased, and she grew calmer.
“I love you,” he said, lifting her face to his.
“I love you, and I know that you love me. That boy—was loved. You will remember him. I will remember him. Isn’t there some hope there?”
His voice, and his face, were grave. Gini, looking up, met the steadiness of his gaze. Unbidden and unexpected, and for the first time in weeks, a physical longing for him stabbed up through her body. It was like a cut from a knife, and it made her ashamed. Fighting it, she rested her face against his chest and listened to the beat of his heart.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Pascal said, and he was right: he did know a great deal of wha
t she was thinking, though not perhaps all. “It’s so fragile—yes? And love is no protection. Death could always be around the next corner, not five minutes away?”
“Yes. That. And—”
“No justice.” He kissed her bent head, then sighed. “Oh, Gini, don’t you see? This is what I was trying to warn you about. I knew this would happen to you. And it’s the hardest thing of all….”
The number was still ringing in Sarajevo. They picked up finally on the twentieth ring. She was lucky this time, for often she obtained one of the desk clerks who spoke poor English. This time it was the nineteen-year-old, the one who prided himself on his grasp of idiom, acquired from years of watching American gangster films.
He said Pascal had checked out; he’d returned that morning at four and left again half an hour later. For two hours the previous evening he had been trying to reach her, but the lines had been bad again. But he had received some of her messages, it seemed, and he would call her, without fail, in the next twenty-four hours.
Gini’s hands were shaking. She replaced the receiver and buried her face in her hands. She knew what that message really meant, and why it had been made to sound reassuring. It meant Pascal had some lead. It meant he had set off somewhere more dangerous than Sarajevo, before light came. There was usually a lull in military activities in the early morning; there was less likelihood of snipers, or of a sudden bombardment, in the few hours before dawn.
She could feel the fear mounting, this terrible disabling panic that always seemed to attack her when she was least prepared. She made herself get up and leave the room. She made herself be active. Returning to the kitchen, she washed the few dishes Charlotte had left in the sink, then pulled on a coat and took the dogs for a short run.
She walked around the garden, and the orchard, her footsteps leaving prints in the frosted grass. She looked up at the fields and the bare hills beyond, and tried to tell herself that this state of mind and state of heart would pass. The random would not occur. Pascal would be safe, and soon, surely soon, he would return. They might even come here, as Charlotte had suggested. They could walk in the hills in the warmth of a summer evening. Just a few months, and this landscape would be transformed. The trees would be in leaf; there would be flowers in bloom. She would love Pascal, and he would love her, and they would be able to talk or be silent, and once again they would both be secure.
Except… She turned back to the house and let herself into the silent kitchen. She sat down at the table and stared unseeingly at the wall. Except: she would rather not have remembered, but she could not forget the conversation with Helen, Pascal’s ex-wife, that had taken place in London shortly before Christmas, four weeks before.
She had met Helen, a thin, brisk, dark-haired Englishwoman, on two occasions before that, both with Pascal. This conversation, over a lunch that had been Helen’s suggestion, had been the first the two women had ever had alone.
Helen had remarried earlier that year. Her new husband, whom she referred to as her good, safe Englishman, was a widower with three teenage children away at boarding school. He had inherited and ran a successful textile manufacturing company that had recently taken over a French silk-weaving business with headquarters in Paris and factories in Lyon. The modernization of this once-famous company now took up much of his time, Helen explained. As a result, she and Ralph had decided to postpone their search for the perfect English country house, and were going to spend the next six months at Ralph’s Paris apartment; this plan had benefits for everyone concerned.
Gini listened to all this numbly. Helen described the interior decorating she had embarked on in Paris. Not a stupid woman, she made no comment about Gini’s lack of animation, or on her appearance, which Gini knew was unimpressive, although she had tried very hard.
“It means, of course,” Helen went on, “that Marianne will be able to stay on for another six months at her French school. She’s been a little difficult about the move to England. I told Ralph—she adores him already, I knew she would—we don’t want to bombard her with too much change. To stay on in her old school, with her friends, just for a while… All in all it seemed the most practical plan. Pascal thought it was sensible too…”
“Oh.” Gini looked up. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yes, well. He and I discussed it briefly. Before the two of you left for Yugoslavia… Bosnia. Whatever one’s supposed to call it now. I expect he just forgot to mention it. You must both have had other things on your mind.”
She looked closely at Gini, who did not reply. She gestured to the waiter to bring more coffee.
“Do you mind if I speak frankly?” she said in an abrupt way, then hesitated. “This isn’t very easy to broach. I want you to know, what I’m going to say isn’t motivated by ill feeling or jealousy. It might have been once, but not now.”
“No, please. I understand.”
“I was married to Pascal for five years. We lived together before that. It may not have been a successful marriage, but I do know Pascal. I know him very well.”
Gini said nothing. She fixed her eyes on the chic scarlet cashmere sweater Helen was wearing; on the single string of pearls. Helen was around forty. She looked a decade younger, radiant, in charge of her life, on top of the world.
“Do you intend always working together, alongside each other? That might be one solution, I suppose.”
“No, we don’t,” Gini replied. “Not always, obviously. We had thought—when we can…”
“I don’t like the term workaholic,” Helen went on. “The word’s overused. It implies an addiction, obviously—but I never felt Pascal was addicted to his work. That would suggest passivity, a lack of willpower on his part—and no one would ever accuse Pascal of that, least of all me.” She gave a tight smile. “I’m sorry. I used to be a translator, as you know. I’m fussy about words.”
She paused thoughtfully, then frowned.
“I always thought Pascal was dedicated to his work, in an intense, almost priestly way. As if it were his vocation—you understand what I mean?”
“Yes, I do. And it costs him a great deal.”
“Perhaps.” Helen pushed this suggestion aside. “For my part, I found that very hard to live with. Not at first, maybe. There was a certain glamour, you know. Pascal was becoming famous. I liked the drama of it all, sending letters off to remote places, trying to get a call through to some war zone. I gave several interviews, did you know that?” Her eyes flicked toward Gini’s. “People were intrigued by how it felt to be his wife. How I coped…” She made a face. “Of course Pascal didn’t approve. He was furious when I showed him the pictures. He always refused interviews. He’s never been interested in being a celebrity. Fame never interested him at all.”
Gini said nothing. She wished Helen had never mentioned war zones in that particular way. She could feel Bosnia very close, just the other side of this restaurant wall; another few minutes and she’d start to hear its sounds; all that desolation and pain would come swooping back to her. This was not normal, she told herself. She had to regain perspective. She forced herself to pay close attention to Helen’s words.
“Even before Marianne was born,” she went on, “there were difficulties. Pascal was away for months at a time. I had to go to parties, dinners, on my own. Of course, I’ve always been very independent, I didn’t really mind…” She gave a small frown.
“Perhaps, if Pascal had earned more money than he did then, it might have been better. We could have had a larger apartment. I could have entertained. It’s awfully easy to get left out, you know, if one’s a woman living alone. I did say to Pascal, he could have earned more—it would have been so easy. Advertising agencies were clamoring to use him. I used to tease him; I’d say, surely you can fit them in, darling, before the next war…”
She laughed, and glanced at Gini.
“I can see. You don’t approve. Maybe you’re more high-minded than I was. I really couldn’t see that it would do the least harm. Anyway, t
hat’s beside the point. On the whole, we managed very well. It was different once Marianne was born.”
She paused, and her face became set.
“I had to manage, Gini, I had to manage entirely alone. Of course, our marriage was a little shaky by then. Even so, if Marianne was ill, if there was any problem at home, small or large, I had to cope with it. Ninety percent of the time Pascal was away. He was on a plane, in an airport, in some damn flea-bitten hotel in the back of beyond, where the switchboard didn’t work half the time, and if it did work, Pascal was never there… I coped. Not always very well. Sometimes, when he got back from Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mozambique, wherever, I’d try to explain. He’d never tell me what he’d been through in those places. He wouldn’t talk about it at all. And I didn’t really want to know. I mean, whatever horror he’d been through—there was nothing I could do. Of course, I knew it wasn’t tactful to start complaining about my little problems. I knew they’d seem petty to him. But I couldn’t stop myself. There’d be scenes, tears, pleas, recriminations, on my part. None of it made the slightest difference. He’d calm me down, then go off and catch the next plane.”
She paused, looking closely at Gini. “After a while it made me angry. Really terribly angry. I felt this fury all the time. If he’d had another woman, I think I could have coped better; at least that would have been commonplace, predictable. But my rival wasn’t a woman, it was his work. From my point of view”—her mouth tightened—“it became unacceptable. An absentee husband is one thing. An absentee father is another. Pascal adored Marianne, of course. When he was actually there, he was wonderful with her. But he simply couldn’t understand that devotion wasn’t enough. Has he changed, would you say?”
The question was sudden. Gini flushed scarlet.