Jane opened her eyes. It was an Antonov, the predatory, slow-moving reconnaissance plane whose incessant growl was the usual herald of faster, noisier jet aircraft on a bombing run. She sat up and looked anxiously across the Valley.
She was in her secret refuge, a broad, flat shelf halfway up a cliff. Above her, the overhang hid her from view without blocking the sun, and would dissuade anyone but a mountaineer from climbing down. Below, the approach to her refuge was steep and stony and bare of vegetation: no one could climb it without being heard and seen by Jane. There was no reason for anyone to come here anyway. Jane had only found the place by wandering from the path and getting lost. The privacy of the place was important because she came here to take off her clothes and lie in the sun, and the Afghans were as modest as nuns: if she were seen naked she would be lynched.
To her right the dusty hillside fell away rapidly. Toward its foot, where the slope began to level out near the river, was the village of Banda, fifty or sixty houses clinging to a patch of uneven, rocky ground that no one could farm. The houses were made of gray stones and mud bricks, and each one had a flat roof of pressed earth laid over mats. Next to the little mosque was a small group of wrecked houses: one of the Russian bombers had scored a direct hit a couple of months back. Jane could see the village clearly, although it was a twenty-minute scramble away. She scanned the roofs and walled courtyards and mud footpaths, looking for stray children, but happily there were none—Banda was deserted under the hot blue sky.
To her left, the Valley broadened out. The small stony fields were dotted with bomb craters, and on the lower slopes of the mountainside several of the ancient terrace walls had collapsed. The wheat was ripe, but no one was reaping.
Beyond the fields, at the foot of the cliff wall that formed the far side of the Valley, ran the Five Lions River: deep in places, shallow in others; now broad, now narrow; always fast and always rocky. Jane scrutinized its length. There were no women bathing or washing clothes, no children playing in the shallows, no men leading horses or donkeys across the ford.
Jane contemplated throwing on her clothes and leaving her refuge to climb farther up the mountainside to the caves. That was where the villagers were, the men sleeping after a night of working in their fields, the women cooking and trying to stop the children wandering, the cows penned and the goats tethered and the dogs fighting over scraps. She was probably quite safe here, for the Russians bombed the villages, not the bare hillsides; but there was always the chance of a stray bomb, and a cave would protect her from everything but a direct hit.
Before she had made up her mind she heard the roar of the jets. She squinted into the sun to look at them. Their noise filled the Valley, swamping the rush of the river, as they passed over her, heading northeast, high but descending, one, two, three, four silver killers, the summit of mankind’s ingenuity deployed to maim illiterate farmers and knock down mud-brick houses and return to base at seven hundred miles per hour.
In a minute they were gone. Banda was to be spared, for today. Slowly, Jane relaxed. The jets terrified her. Banda had escaped bombing completely last summer, and the whole of the Valley got a respite during the winter; but it had started again in earnest this spring, and Banda had been hit several times, once in the center of the village. Since then Jane had hated the jets.
The courage of the villagers was amazing. Each family had made a second home up in the caves, and they climbed the hill every morning to spend the day there, returning at dusk, for there was no bombing at night. Since it was unsafe to work in the fields by day, the men did it at night—or rather the older ones did, for the young men were away most of the time, shooting at Russians down at the southern end of the Valley or farther afield. This summer the bombing was more intensive than ever in all the rebel areas, according to what Jean-Pierre heard from the guerrillas. If Afghans in other parts of the country were like these here in the Valley, they were able to adapt and survive: salvaging a few precious possessions from the rubble of a bombed house, tirelessly replanting a ruined vegetable garden, nursing the wounded and burying the dead, and sending ever-younger teenage boys to join the guerrilla leaders. The Russians could never defeat these people, Jane felt, unless they turned the whole country into a radioactive desert.
As to whether the rebels could ever defeat the Russians—that was another question. They were brave and irrepressible, and they controlled the countryside, but rival tribes hated one another almost as much as they hated the invaders, and their rifles were useless against jet bombers and armored helicopters.
She pushed thoughts of war out of her mind. This was the heat of the day, the siesta time, when she liked to be alone and relax. She put her hand into a goatskin bag of clarified butter and began to oil the taut skin of her enormous belly, wondering how she could possibly have been so foolish as to get pregnant in Afghanistan.
She had arrived with a two-year supply of contraceptive pills, a diaphragm, and a whole carton of spermicidal jelly; and yet, just a few weeks later, she had forgotten to restart the pills after her period and then forgotten to put in the diaphragm—several times. “How could you make such a mistake?” Jean-Pierre had yelled, and she had had no answer.
But now, lying in the sun, cheerfully pregnant with lovely swollen breasts and a permanent backache, she could see that it had been a deliberate mistake, a kind of professional foul perpetrated by her unconscious mind. She had wanted a baby, and she knew Jean-Pierre did not, so she had started one by accident.
Why did I want a baby so badly? she asked herself, and the answer came to her out of nowhere: because I was lonely.
“Is that true?” she said aloud. It would be ironic. She had never felt lonely in Paris, living on her own and shopping for one and talking to herself in the mirror; but when she was married, and spent every evening and every night with her husband and worked alongside him most of every day, then she had felt isolated, frightened and alone.
They had married in Paris just before coming here. It had seemed a natural part of the adventure, somehow: another challenge, another risk, another thrill. Everyone had said how happy and beautiful and brave and in love they were, and it had been true.
No doubt she had expected too much. She had looked forward to ever-growing love and intimacy with Jean-Pierre. She had thought she would learn about his childhood sweetheart and what he was really frightened of and whether it was true that men shook the drops off after peeing; and in turn she would tell him that her father had been an alcoholic and that she had a fantasy about being raped by a black man and that she sometimes sucked her thumb when she was anxious. But Jean-Pierre seemed to think their relationship after marriage should be just what it had been before. He treated her courteously, made her laugh in his manic moods, fell helpless into her arms when he was depressed, discussed politics and the war, made love to her expertly once a week with his lean young body and his strong, sensitive surgeon’s hands, and behaved in every way like a boyfriend rather than a husband. She still felt unable to talk to him about silly, embarrassing things such as whether a hat made her nose look longer and how angry she still was about having been spanked for spilling red ink on the drawing room rug when in fact her sister, Pauline, had done it. She wanted to ask someone Is this how it’s supposed to be, or will it get better? but her friends and family were all far away and the Afghan women would have found her expectations outrageous. She had resisted the temptation to confront Jean-Pierre with her disappointment, partly because her complaint was so vague, and partly because she was frightened of what his answer might be.