If he had left a photograph of her in his quarters in Jalalabad and failed to return from a mission, then the picture with his other possessions would slip into the plastic sack to go to his wife and his son. And that was why when he took her to bed he never closed his eyes, never ever, because if his eyes were open then he would remember her better when he flew over the mountains and valleys, above the convoys, through the rifle fire.
The bed shook and creaked and heaved as the Major made a play at loving the agronomist's wife.
Four days out on the trail from the salient of Parachinar, the group of Hizbi-i-Islami mujahidin with whom Mia Fiori travelled had stopped at this village for food and sleep.
But she was a nurse so she was taken at once to the house of the mullah, and was shown the wounded. She spoke only a few words of the dialect of the Pathan tribespeople — but enough to communicate the basics of information.
Her destination was the Panjshir valley, eight or nine days and nights march ahead.
The mujahidin who escorted her would allow her to spend this one night caring for the wounded they found in the village. She had little influence over these people. It would have been different if the doctor had travelled with her, but a sudden stomach infection had put the doctor to bed in Peshawar and dictated that she travel alone with the Hizbi-i-Islami. Mia Fiori had work that had to be done in the Panjshir and she had determined to make the journey. In this village, through the hours of darkness, she could accomplish her best at cleaning and cauterising the wounds, she could feed into these wracked bodies a little of the morphine that she carried in her back pack, and then when the dawn came she must walk away from them to the next village.
There had been fourteen in the group, she was told. Eight were dead already. Five more lay on the makeshift bedding that had been spread across the swept concrete floor of the mullah's house. A boy cowered in the black shadow against a windowless wall of dry stone, hunched in a blanket, protecting something hidden. Already there was the stink of infection from the opened bowel wounds, from the embedded shrapnel, from the protruding bone splinters. She was not a surgeon, she was a nurse. She did not have the skills of surgery, nor the equipment.
On her knees she moved amongst the wounded five, dabbing with lint cloth. When she looked up and into the faces of the watching tribesmen she was met with only cold stares. As if they read her despair and wondered why she bothered. Death in the jihad was martyrdom, why then prolong a hopeless life? To win them a little comfort, she exhausted that small stock of morphine.
She had long hair, dark and curled in ringlets and falling over her ears. She had deep wind-tanned cheeks. She had the strong nose of a fighter, and the chin of a combatant.
Something of the hawk in her face, something too of the lion. A small bosom that would go unnoticed under a grey cheesecloth blouse. Long and rangy legs, loose moving in the full skirt that when she stood would cover her ankles. Grey socks rolled low on her ankles and heavy duty walking sandals.
Mia was not concerned about her appearance. The passing of the first bloom of her youth was a matter of supreme indifference to her. Appearance had not helped her as a teenager living in the tower flats of Rome's Via Nomentana, nor when she trained in nursing at the Policlinico, nor when she married the club-foot French medical student who was misshapen and whom she loved, nor when he had qualified and they married and he had piled their old Renault into an unlit parked lorry, nor when she had buried him. Appearance was an irrelevance when she had taken a job as a ward nurse in a public hospital close to St Germain. On a bright spring morning, without a comb in her hair and without cosmetics on her face, she had walked into the back street office at Aide Medicale Internationale and said matter-of-factly that she had her summer leave to fill. She had spent the previous summer with a doctor and another nurse in the Panjshir. She had spent the long Paris winter fretting again for her leave and the chance to return. A long winter of dreaming of a sort of homecoming, and on the floor of the mullah's house was the reality of the homecoming.
She stood up, and shrugged. The men gazed back at her without emotion.
Of course she knew of the jihad. All last summer the creed of the holy war and sacrifice had been belted into her by the fighters. Mia was a survivor. She sighed, and cleaned her hands on a cloth. The kerosene threw waving shadows through the room, flickered in the eyes of the men, flashed on their teeth. There were the soft, patient sob groans of the wounded for whom she knew there was no hope. She saw the boy in the corner, against the far wall from the doorway. He was wrapped in a blanket of fine bright colours and his knees made a tent of the blanket and were drawn up against his chest, and he shivered in shock, and there was dark congealed blood on his forehead.
She came close to him, knelt in front of him, seemed to shield him from the scene of dying men.
'Parla I'italiano…I'inglese?'
'English, I speak English'. A little whispered voice.
'I can speak in English. My name is Mia. What is your name?'
'I am Gul Bahdur.'
'You were with these men?' She gestured behind her. 'How long ago?'
'Four days ago, the helicopters came…I have to go back to Peshawar.'
'When you are ready you can go back. First you must rest.'
'I have to go back to Peshawar.' The boy was crying. He struggled against the tears and failed.
'When you are ready.'
Mia wiped at the tears on the soft brown cheeks of the boy. She held his chin in her hand to steady the trembling and peered at the head wound.
'It is nothing,' the boy said.
'It is your only wound?'
'It is nothing, I am here to wait for my companions to come with me.'
She felt the boy draw back from her as she dabbed at the wound. She looked into his eyes, into his youth. 'Why do you have to go back to Peshawar, Gul Bahdur?'
'I have to.'
Mia pulled back the blanket, catching the boy by surprise. She saw the Redeye missile launcher, the light of the kerosene lamp winked on the wires of the sighting. It was something she had not seen before. She dropped the blanket, concealed it.
'You have to take that back?'
The boy did not reply.
She reached into her back pack, took out a bandage and wrapped it fast and tight on the boy's forehead. His eyes glowed beneath the white of the bandage, his hair peeped above the binding. She knotted the ties, then stood up. She went back towards the five men on the floor, looked down on them, shrugged again. The gesture was understood, and the despair in her face.
Only in the Panjshir were the nurses and doctors who came from Paris accorded a genuine welcome. In the Panjshir the resistance had achieved a liberated zone. In that valley the doctors and nurses were honoured. Away in the high desert lands of the Hazaras a French doctor had been forced to quit when the village people he sought to help would not feed him because their mullah had branded him an unbeliever. But whether they were welcomed, or whether they were shunned, the small medical teams with their trifling supplies of French-donated drugs and antiseptics, lived and worked in the knowledge that their efforts were pitifully small.
And there were dangers. After the principal guerrilla commanders, the Soviets put the doctors and nurses on the top of the list for death or capture. Eight years in a Kabul gaol had been the sentence handed down to a young French doctor trapped in a surrounded village. Perhaps they all felt a sense of adventure, the doctors and the nurses, when they went to the offices of AMI to offer their services. But the spirit of adventure died fast inside Afghanistan. The first sight of a foot blown away by a butterfly anti-personnel, the first sight of a body disembowelled by the rocket's splinters, the first sight of the lemon-sized exit wound of a high explosive bullet, all of those extinguished the spirit of adventure. And for Mia Fiori it was a daily sorrow when she must move on, away from men that she could not help.