Free Charlie Johnson in the Flames by Michael Ignatieff

vegetables through the colander for Magda, and stood close by her at the sink, and they talked about the book she was copy-editing for a publisher in Hamburg. They listened to gloomy orchestral music from Polish composers – Penderecki, Gorecki, Szymanowski, Magda explained – sitting in silence in the television room, Jacek in the chair by the window, Magda with her bare feet curled up beneath her in a chair on the opposite side of the room, and Charlie lying on the couch, staring upwards and wondering whether music had colour, and what mixture of cobalt, blue and black this music was.
    His wife stopped calling, and Etta didn’t ring either and he felt that he was at peace, except for the recurring dream of the woman on fire and her embrace. It was as if a moment in time was going to take an eternity to disclose itself, the pressure of her fingers on his shoulder-blades, the force of her cheek against his, the incredible smell of her singed hair, all of it recurring over and over as if struggling still to make its meaning plain.
    He talked about the woman with Magda, trying to find a way to describe this terrible feeling of intimacy with a total stranger, how they were locked together in an embrace which had ended with death. What was difficult to find words for was the sense that it had all been a mistake, a joke, a dare between men, with these unbearable consequences for someone whose name he didn’t even know. Magda listened – as she must be listening to Jacek telling the same story at night, while she lay by his side in their bedroom – and after a while Charlie realised that it must be puzzling for her that he seemed to expect her to know what it all meant. For she didn’t know: she merely seemed to think of the woman as the symbol of all the other people in mortal harm who had impinged upon her husband’s life and found their way, momentarily, between the cross-hairs of his lens. She felt compassion for them, but in an abstract kind of way, while for Charlie this woman was no symbol at all. She had been so terribly real that he could not get the smell of her burning flesh out of his memory.
    â€˜You won’t always dream about her, Charlie,’ was what Magda said, which Charlie knew was true, but not very comforting. If he stopped dreaming about her, Charlie said, he would betray her. If he continued to dream about her, his life would become impossible.
    â€˜What does betrayal have to do with it?’ Magda wanted to know, looking up from her manuscript as Charlie walked about her kitchen, sufficiently recovered now to hold the vodka bottle in his hand.
    â€˜Because we’re the ones who know what she went through. So if we forget, it just seems even more point less than it already is.’
    â€˜So who makes us Mr Memory?’ Jacek wanted to know from the other side of the room.
    Charlie laughed. Mr Memory was the best thing in Hitchcock’s Thirty-Nine Steps , the vaudeville guy with the pencil moustache and a perfect memory, hired by the bad guys to memorise the secret code. It was all a bit far-fetched, but the final scene was great when Mr Memory was on stage in the vaudeville house and Hannay stood up in the smoky audience and asked him to repeat the secret formula, and before the bad guys could stop him, Mr Memory began spilling it out, right there on stage. What was poignant was the look in his eyes, as if he was truly helpless in the face of knowledge and the obligation to disclose it. Standing there on stage, with his wax moustache and bow-tie, transfixed by the obligation to speak, he couldn’t help reeling off the secret formula until a bullet from his controller, fired from the wings, put him out of his misery.
    â€˜Nobody makes us Mr Memory,’ Charlie said. ‘We do it to ourselves.’
    He got Jacek to drive him to the airport the next day. Outside the house, he held Magda tightly between his still-bandaged hands and as he got into the