The daytime hideout of the villagers of Banda looked like the desert encampment of a tribe of nomads: the dusty ground, the blazing midday sun, the remains of cooking fires, the hooded women, the dirty children. Jane crossed the small square of level ground in front of the caves. The women were already converging on the largest cave, which Jane and Jean-Pierre had made their clinic. Jean-Pierre heard the commotion and came out. Gratefully, Jane handed Mousa to him, saying in French: “It was a mine. He’s lost his hand. Give me your shirt.”
Jean-Pierre took Mousa inside and laid him down on the rug which served as an examination table. Before attending to the child he stripped off his bleached-khaki shirt and gave it to Jane. She put it on.
She felt a little light-headed. She thought she would sit down and rest in the cool rear of the cave, but after taking a couple of steps in that direction, she changed her mind and sat down immediately. Jean-Pierre said: “Get me some swabs.” She ignored him. Mousa’s mother, Halima, came running into the cave and began screaming when she saw her son. I should calm her, Jane thought, so that she can comfort the child; why can’t I get up? I think I’ll close my eyes. Just for a minute.
By nightfall Jane knew her baby was coming.
When she came around after fainting in the cave, she had what she thought was a backache—caused, she assumed, by carrying Mousa. Jean-Pierre agreed with her diagnosis, gave her an aspirin and told her to lie still. Rabia, the midwife, came into the cave to see Mousa, and gave Jane a hard look, but at the time Jane did not understand its significance. Jean-Pierre cleaned and dressed Mousa’s stump, gave him penicillin and injected him against tetanus. The child would not die of infection, as almost certainly he would have without Western medicine; but all the same Jane wondered whether his life would be worth living—survival here was hard even for the fittest, and crippled children generally died young.
Late in the afternoon Jean-Pierre prepared to leave. He was scheduled to hold a clinic tomorrow in a village several miles away, and—for some reason Jane had never quite understood—he never missed such appointments, even though he knew that no Afghan would have been surprised if he had been a day or even a week late.
By the time he kissed Jane good-bye she was beginning to wonder whether her backache might be the beginning of labor, brought on early by her ordeal with Mousa, but as she had never had a baby before, she could not tell, and it seemed unlikely. She asked Jean-Pierre. “Don’t worry,” he said briskly. “You’ve got another six weeks to wait.” She asked him whether he ought perhaps to stay, just in case, but he thought it was quite unnecessary, and she began to feel foolish; so she let him go, with his medical supplies loaded on a scrawny horse, to reach his destination before dark so that he could begin work first thing in the morning.
When the sun began to set behind the western cliff wall, and the valley was brimful of shadow, Jane walked with the women and children down the mountainside to the darkening village, and the men headed for their fields, to reap their crops while the bombers slept.
The house in which Jane and Jean-Pierre lived actually belonged to the village shopkeeper, who had given up hope of making money in wartime— there was almost nothing to sell—and had decamped, with his family, to Pakistan. The front room, formerly the shop, had been Jean-Pierre’s clinic until the intensity of the summer bombing had driven the villagers to the caves during the day. The house had two back rooms, one would have been for the men and their guests, the other for women and children. Jane and Jean-Pierre used them as bedroom and living room. At the side of the house was a mud-walled courtyard containing the cooking fire and a small pool for washing clothes, dishes and children. The shopkeeper had left behind some homemade wooden furniture, and the villagers had loaned Jane several beautiful rugs for the floors. Jane and Jean-Pierre slept on a mattress, like the Afghans, but they had a down sleeping bag instead of blankets. Like the Afghans, they rolled up the mattress during the day or put it on the flat roof to air in fine weather. In the summer everyone slept on the roofs.
Walking from the cave to the house had a peculiar effect on Jane. Her backache got much worse, and when she reached home she was ready to collapse with pain and exhaustion. She had a desperate urge to pee, but she was too tired to go outside to the latrine, so she used the emergency pot behind the screen in the bedroom. It was then that she noticed a small blood-streaked stain in the crotch of her cotton trousers.
She did not have the energy to climb up the outside ladder onto the roof to fetch the mattress, so she lay on a rug in the bedroom. The “backache” came in waves. She put her hands on her tummy during the next wave, and felt the bulge shift, sticking farther out as the pain increased then flattening again as it eased. Now she was in no doubt that she was having contractions.
She was frightened. She recalled talking to her sister, Pauline, about childbirth. After Pauline’s first, Jane had visited her, taking a bottle of champagne and a little marijuana. When they were both extremely relaxed, Jane had asked what it was really like, and Pauline had replied: “Like shit-ting a melon.” They had giggled for what seemed like hours.
But Pauline had given birth at University College Hospital in the heart of London, not in a mud-brick house in the Five Lions Valley.
Jane thought: What am I going to do?
I mustn’t panic. I must wash myself with warm water and soap; find a sharp scissors and put it in boiling water for fifteen minutes; get clean sheets to lie on; sip liquids; and relax.
But before she could do anything, another contraction began, and this one really hurt. She closed her eyes and tried to take slow, deep, regular breaths, as Jean-Pierre had explained, but it was difficult to be so controlled when all she wanted to do was cry out in fear and pain.
The spasm left her drained. She lay still, recovering. She realized she could not do any of the things she had listed: she could not manage on her own. As soon as she felt strong enough she would get up and go to the nearest house and ask the women to fetch the midwife.
The next contraction came sooner than she had expected, after what seemed like only a minute or two. As the tension reached its peak Jane said aloud: “Why don’t they tell you how much it hurts?”
As soon as it passed its peak she forced herself to get up. The terror of giving birth all alone gave her strength. She hobbled from the bedroom into the living room. She felt a little stronger with each step. She made it out into the courtyard; then suddenly there was a gush of warm fluid between her thighs, and her trousers were instantly drenched: the waters had broken. “Oh, no,” she groaned. She leaned against the doorpost. She was not sure she could walk even a few yards with her trousers falling down like this. She felt humiliated. “I must,” she said; but a new contraction began, and she sank to the ground, thinking: I’m going to have to do this alone.
Next time she opened her eyes there was a man’s face close to her own. He looked like an Arab sheikh: he had dark brown skin, black eyes and a black mustache, and his features were aristocratic—high cheekbones, a Roman nose, white teeth and a long jaw. It was Mohammed Khan, the father of Mousa.
“Thank God,” Jane muttered thickly.
“I came to thank you for saving the life of my only son,” Mohammed said in Dari. “Are you sick?”
“I’m having a baby.”
“Now?” he said, startled.
“Soon. Help me into the house.”
He hesitated—childbirth, like all things uniquely feminine, was considered unclean—but to his credit the hesitation was only momentary. He lifted her to her feet and supported her as she walked through the living room and into the bedroom. She lay down on the rug again. “Get help,” she told him.