Right of Thirst (12 page)

“It is okay,” I said. As I spoke, I must have looked terrible to him, dressed like that, in the surgical gown, with his sister's blood splashed across my belly. He gave me a long frightened look, and then he turned and stepped quickly into the tent.

I took a few steps away from the tent, feeling better with each breath. The peaks around me, the clear thin air, the grit of stones under my feet, the clarity of the sky—it steadied me, somehow, and by degrees I was myself again.

There are times when the weak inhabit the acts of the strong, and are therefore indistinguishable from them.

Rachel came up the walk from the mailbox with the magazine in her hand. It was a fall day, and leaves were coming off the trees. I'd been raking them most of the morning, and was taking a break on the porch, drinking a glass of iced tea. Eric was six years old.

“Look,” Rachel said, her face troubled, stepping up onto the porch and sitting down beside me on the bench. “Mary Spruance died.”

She handed me the magazine. It was the medical alumni review, and there she was—the woman I'd spoken to for five minutes nearly ten years before. The photograph had been taken decades earlier, but I recognized her nonetheless, and felt an unexpected pang of sorrow. “Philanthropist and Friend,” the headline read, and below it, the bracketed years of her life.

“She lived a long time, but it's sad, isn't it? I still have that dress. It's in the closet in the guest room.”

“Really? I thought it was long gone.”

She started to cry.

I looked at her, puzzled, then reached out and took her hand.

“I'm not happy, Charles,” she said, after a long while. “You're hardly ever home. I thought it would be better when you finished your fellowship and instead nothing's changed.”

“I'll have more time when the grants are done. That's only a couple of weeks away.”

“It's always the same, Charles. This grant, that study. They're always so important.”

“Those grants pay part of my salary,” I said. “They are important. We have bills. We have to save for the future. Do you think I'd rather be at work than here with you and Eric?”

“Yes,” she said, quietly, drying her tears. “I do.”

She stood up.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“I think he's playing with his toys in the living room.”

“You
think
? This is your day off. Why aren't you spending it with him?”

“Rachel, all I'm doing is raking the lawn. It needs to be done.”

She watched me some more, eyes narrowed, shaking her head, as if from a distance.

“I didn't know it would be like this,” she said. “I thought you were someone else.”

I threw up my hands.

“What can I say to that?” I replied, angry by then. “I'm doing the best I can.”

“Who are you, Charles?” she asked, as she turned away. “Who are you really?”

 

“What are you thinking about, Doctor?” Rai asked, startling me.

“I was thinking about my wife,” I replied.

“I am sorry,” he said, in a sympathetic tone. “I often think about my parents also.”

“Did they know your daughters?”

He shook his head.

“Well, then I'm sorry, too.”

“There is nothing to be done,” he said. “This is in God's hands.”

He reached for his cigarettes on the table, and we were quiet for a while.

“Sanjit,” I said, finally, as he lit the cigarette. “Where are the refugees? I can't wait for them forever.”

“I do not know. Eventually they will be coming. Probably they do not know, that is all. And the snow also.”

“We've been here for almost a month. I'm wasting my time.”

“Of course,” he replied. “But then I am also wasting my time.”

“Why aren't there enough supplies?”

“There are enough to begin. And we will not solve this now.”

Just then the satellite phone rang, and he stared in surprise at it for a moment. It had never rung before. He glanced uneasily at me, then picked up the phone, his voice coming to attention as he answered. He spoke a few words, listened, spoke again, his tone clipped and exact. The exchange was in his native language, so I understood nothing, and it was over in only a few seconds. When it was over, he took a deep breath, then let it out.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“There is going to be an inspection,” he said. “They are coming today.”

“Who is ‘they'?”

“General Said. He is in command of this sector.” He shook his head.

“Is that a problem?”

“Of course it is a problem. He is a taskmaster, very strict. He is famous for these surprises.”

“You haven't done anything wrong.”

“No,” he said. “But everything must be ready. Everything must be correct.” He swore, and then he stood up and put on his jacket.

“Where are you going?”

“I am going to check on the tents,” he said. “And the supplies.”

“Do you want any help?” I asked.

He looked down at me, a flat, aggressive look in his eye that I'd seen before when he felt threatened.

“No,” he said, dismissively. It struck me that three weeks earlier he never would have been so casual with me, or so revealing, or so inadvertently rude.

He left the tent, brooding and taciturn. I wondered about his wife in the city, and his little daughters, and what exactly it was that he seemed to want so much. I wondered why the only true refugee we had seen thus far was Homa. I wondered where on earth they were.

Rai spent the next few hours furiously adjusting the tents—tightening ropes, yelling at Ali and his nephew, who rushed to straighten up the dining tent. He shaved, also, badly, with a disposable razor, and then he changed his uniform. He looked unwashed nonetheless, as all of us did. And he looked concerned. Elise watched him with some amusement, which made him even angrier.

It was the kind of valley suited for echoes, and so we heard the unmistakable beat of a helicopter long before it appeared like a little dark bead in the low sky to the south. We were watching for it. I'd cleaned up a bit myself, trimmed the beard that I'd allowed to grow, brushing the gray clippings carefully off my jacket. I don't know why I bothered. Elise was not immune to such impulses, either—she'd put on a clean fleece pullover, and
washed her face with a bowl of hot water Ali had given her. Her face looked red and healthy, and she stared at the helicopter with great curiosity.

We'd become comfortable with each other, I realized—comfortable enough that we didn't care about whether we wore a stained jacket to the dinner tent, or whether our necks were gray with dirt. And now this, a visitor, reminding us of our casual intimacy, and how it had crept up on us.

We stood outside the dining tent, hands shading our eyes, watching it grow nearer, and suddenly it was overhead, circling past us, out over the river, then turning back, sunlight reflecting off the canopy, the disk of the rotors above it shining like a coin for an instant.

It was a large helicopter, bulbous, foreign-looking, not at all sleek and light like Western machines. It looked strong and brutal and industrial.

“Russian,” Rai said, when I asked him. “Mi-17. Very powerful.”

I could see the pilots clearly through the canopy, wearing white helmets and sunglasses. They were looking at the ground, picking out a suitable place to land. They eased closer, into a hover, and the rotors began sending up billowing clouds of dust, drifting over the tents, and then, casually and gently, they set down on the gravel thirty yards away. A moment later the dust and small stones from the rotor wash struck us and we turned our backs all at once as the wind fell, and the helicopter relaxed heavily onto its oversize black tires, the green paint on its flanks dented and scratched, stained with oil and military markings, the shining canopy, as the turbines wound down in a slow descending moan. After a while the individual blades of the rotor flashed into view out of the blur, and I could smell the hot sweet exhaust, as the rotors swept to a stop and all was quiet again.
The machine seemed at home there, parked among the tents, and then the doors opened.

General Said was a short man with wide flat hips, sloping hunched shoulders, a little potbelly, a black mustache streaked with gray, and warm brown eyes—a handsome man's face on a small ungainly body. He wore a red beret with two gold stars on the center, a green sweater much like Captain Rai's, heavy green wool pants, a small black pistol on his belt, and leather combat boots. His feet were small, delicate. Perhaps he was sixty, perhaps a few years younger. He seemed pleasantly amused as he stepped easily down from the helicopter and began walking purposefully across the gravel to meet us.

Two soldiers accompanied him. They were also mustached, though broad shouldered and tall and stern. One of them carried an elegant bolt-action rifle with a telescopic sight slung over his shoulder. It was a civilian weapon with a finely engraved wood stock, and it looked out of place. I studied it for an instant, reading the words engraved on the black action—
Weatherby 7mm magnum
. The light caught the fine grains of wood beneath the varnish, and the brown leather strap was tooled and oiled and soft.

The other man held a notebook, its purpose unclear. The pilots remained in the helicopter, anonymous in their flight helmets.

As the general approached, Rai muttered something unintelligible under his breath, and then he came to full attention and saluted. He did it as sharply as he possibly could, and his boots came together with a muffled slap. On another occasion I might have laughed, but Rai's face was as stern and expressionless as he could make it, and he held the position until General Said stopped before us and waved his own hand casually near his forehead.

“At ease, Captain,” he said, in English, in a pleasant tone.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Permit me to welcome you to our camp.”

“All right, all right,” the general said. “We are among friends now. There is no need for all that parade-ground nonsense.”

“Yes, sir,” Rai said again, attempting to relax. I'd no doubt that he would have much preferred to spend the entire afternoon formally at attention. Now he had to laugh, and move easily, and play the host, and the effort that this required was abundantly clear.

“And what do we have here?” General Said said, looking inquisitively at Elise. “Rai, you have drawn difficult duty. Up here with this beautiful girl so far away from home.”

Elise opened her mouth, then closed it again. She clearly had no idea what to say, and began instantly to blush. Rai reddened also, but he managed to introduce them well enough.

I half expected the general to kiss her hand. Instead, he merely shook it, and said he was pleased to meet her.

“I have a message for you, young lady,” he said, with mock severity. “A message that I am afraid you will not like.”

“A message?” she repeated, confused. “What message?”

“You see, I must break your heart,” he said, and winked. “Our mutual friend Scott Coles cannot come as planned. I am sorry, but he has been delayed. He has called me and asked me to tell both of you this.”

Elise did not reply, but I saw the disappointment in her face nonetheless, and with it I felt a dark stab of personal reduction. I said nothing to her, because the general was turning to me.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“This I do not know, I am sorry,” he said. “But he said he will try to come in a few weeks' time.”

“We need to talk to him.”

The general smiled and inclined his head.

“You must be the American doctor,” he said, and extended his hand.

“Yes,” I said, and smiled as best I could as I introduced myself. His handshake was firm.

“Thank you for your good works,” he said. “And how has Captain Rai been treating you? Are you comfortable here in this wilderness? Is there anything you need?”

I said that Captain Rai had done an excellent job and could not be improved upon as a host. As I spoke, I saw Rai shoot a sideways glance in my direction.

“Yes, well, I am not surprised,” General Said said, reaching out and clapping Rai on the shoulder. “He is one of our best young officers and so I expect this.”

“Thank you, sir,” Rai said.

“Okay,” the general said, looking around, his hands clasped together. “I've come to inspect, so then I must inspect. But first perhaps I shall have a cup of tea.” He made no effort to introduce his companions.

“Of course, sir,” Rai said immediately.

Rai had anticipated this, and Ali and his nephew had been hard at work in the cooking tent since we'd first learned the news. They'd in fact produced an entire meal, and Ali was waiting just outside the tent when we reached it. The table we normally used held several covered dishes, and was laid out with a single setting of real silverware, and a cloth napkin, a fact that astonished me. Then the general entered the tent, glanced at the table.

“No, no,” he said, with a dismissive wave. “Tea is all I want.”

Rai spoke harshly to Ali, who in a flurry removed the dishes from the table and carried them back to the cooking tent.

The two guards remained outside. It was the four of us—Elise, and Rai, the general and myself. We drank tea by the
heater. He talked about his time, as a young man, at a British university, and how he had come to enjoy beer a bit too much in those days. He spoke of how foreign beer had been to his youthful palate, how it was an acquired taste that he, he was ashamed to say, had proved very good indeed at acquiring. He said his father had threatened to cut him off until he realized that it was time to put away such frivolities—that was the word he used—and to dedicate himself to larger things.

“Not like Captain Rai,” he said, winking. “He has always been very serious. Too serious in some ways.”

Rai bowed his head and attempted to smile.

A few moments passed as we finished our tea.

“Tell me, General,” I said then. “When do you expect the refugees to arrive? Where are they? We were told that they would be here by now.”

He nodded seriously. “Of course this must be difficult for you,” he said. “So much twiddling of thumbs. But I assure you they are coming.”

“There are also not enough supplies,” I said. “Not nearly enough.”

Again the general nodded.

“You must talk to Scott Coles about why this is so. He has responsibility for this, you understand. I am only here today to show my support. But when the refugees come, we will bring in more supplies, of course. And personnel as well. Do not worry.”