Read Online Charlie Johnson in the Flames by Michael Ignatieff - Free Book Online

nothing.
    â€˜Maybe we should stop doing this,’ Charlie ventured. ‘The road trips.’
    â€˜Magda agrees with you.’
    â€˜And you?’
    Jacek came back and sat down on the edge of Charlie’s bed.
    â€˜We do this thing together. You are good. I am good. Someone else will do it worse.’
    â€˜Why do it at all?’
    Neither said anything. They knew why they did it, but it seemed ridiculous to rehearse the reasons or to evaluate them now that everything had gone wrong and someone had died because of it. You either kept on or you stopped, and neither knew what they would do now. The honest truth was that it didn’t depend on what they said or thought, but on how they would feel, much later, when the assignments were offered, when they watched a situation develop somewhere and felt that desire again, to be there, to be in the middle of it and to be working together.
    They knew what the mistake had been: to trust Benny, whom Charlie had instinctively recognised as a chancer. It always came down to this sort of judgement of a stranger: would he deliver? would he betray? did he have any capacity to improvise if things went into that zone of uncertainty or chaos? Benny had been the mistake, but what kind of mistake was that? The kind nothing can stop you making, and which you would make again. They’d tried to save her; they’d intended none of this; they weren’t responsible for the war; they had been doing their job. End of story.
    Except that it wasn’t. Or wouldn’t be. Or couldn’t be.
    â€˜What’s Magda say?’
    â€˜That it’s too high a price to pay in order just to feel that you are alive.’
    It was dark now, and the light on Jacek’s face was from the single reading lamp. He was bent over, leaning both palms on his knees, looking nowhere in particular, long thin pale hair falling forward and obscuring half his face. He looked the way he always did, tired and distant, with the possibility of very rapid movement just a second away. But it occurred to Charlie that in all the time they had worked together, he had never asked himself whether Jacek could go on, never wondered whether his friend was feeling the same hollowed-out, desolate feeling inside. For it had been Magda who had made Charlie feel that Jacek must be immune to this desolation. It was strange to think that maybe there was no protection at all against this feeling, not even a woman who would do anything for you.
    â€˜Your wife called again,’ Jacek said. ‘Every day in fact.’
    Charlie said nothing. Men, in Charlie’s experience, did not talk about their wives to other men. Not really. Things were said, but nothing that went close. All Charlie knew, for example, was what Magda did and that they had been together ever since Jacek got out of jail for the trick with the garbage can. He had never told Jacek the least thing about Elizabeth, flautist, music teacher, now deputy school principal. It all just seemed irrelevant, an intrusion on the best thing about their relationship, which was that they were hunters together.
    Down in the valley hadn’t been the only time Jacek had saved his life. There had been Karte Seh hospital in Kabul, when Hekmatyar’s incoming was reducing every adobe wall they sheltered behind to dust. Jacek pulled him away and got them into the Jeep and back to the Intercontinental when Charlie would have pushed them into catching a round or worse. And Charlie had returned the compliment in Huambo, when Jacek stepped around the compound wall to film the boy with the scar on his cheek, coming up the street towards them, Rambo on weed, firing and dancing, weapon on his hip, spraying bullets to and fro, hopping and popping on the balls of his feet. He was shooting up the street the way a kid back home would play with a water hose, but it was Jacek’s call – that by turning over just then, the boy wouldn’t play the gun on them.