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The woman returned between two bursts of static while Armand still had the handset against his ear. Her voice emerged with such composure that for an instant it seemed the interference belonged to somebody else’s transmission and she had merely waited for it to pass. “You came back, Caporal.”
Armand shifted the handset closer to his mouth and glanced through the open side of the communications shelter. Nobody appeared to have noticed. Beyond the corrugated wall, the camp lay beneath a damp, breathless darkness interrupted by hooded lamps, the glow escaping doorways and the dull red pulse of a cigarette near the vehicle enclosure. The generator muttered somewhere behind the huts, losing its rhythm every few seconds before recovering with an irritated shudder. “I hadn’t realised I’d gone anywhere.”
“You put down the handset.”
“I had work.”
“Of course.”
He stepped outside, carrying the radio as far as its cord permitted, and began the same slow passage he had made during her previous intrusion: out from the shadow of the shelter, beneath the awning where ammunition crates had been stacked against the rain, then back again. The ground was packed hard there, protected from the worst of the afternoon downpour, although the heel of his left boot still found a shallow patch of mud at the edge of each turn. He kept his pace loose and his shoulders lowered, as if he had wandered outside for air and happened to be speaking to somebody unimportant. “You’re becoming difficult to avoid.”
“Not very difficult. You returned to the same frequency.”
“So did you.”
“I was hoping you might.”
The answer made him wet his lips before he could prevent himself. He lowered his voice another fraction, enough that anybody passing the shelter would hear a murmur without distinguishing words. The men on radio duty had become accustomed to hostile voices breaking into unsecured transmissions. Most were crude, repetitive performances which could be mocked afterward over cards, their threats recited in extravagant accents until they no longer sounded like threats. The woman had offered no slogans and raised her voice only once, when static had swallowed part of a sentence. During the first interruption she had spoken to whoever might be listening. During the second she had addressed the man holding the handset. Now she called him by rank as though they had arranged the hour together.
Armand reached the farthest crate, turned and began back. “How do you know who answered?”
“I have heard your voice before.”
“Have you?”
“Yes.”
“I’m flattered.”
He wanted the remark to fall with more weight than it did. The proper tone was obvious to him: amused, mildly contemptuous, a soldier indulging a woman whose only weapon was a stolen frequency. What came through instead was a careful imitation of boredom, smooth enough until the last syllable, where his breath failed to support it. He passed the open side of the awning and drew closer to the crates without appearing to alter course.
“You are Caporal Armand Veyrac,” she said.
“If you say so.”
“You don’t?”
“Some days I’m less certain than others.”
“That must be tiring.”
Her French was precise without being native. The faint stresses that betrayed her came and went, stronger when she softened a consonant, almost absent when she used his name. He had expected a Russian voice to sound heavier, perhaps colder, and disliked himself for having expected anything. She spoke as if resting comfortably somewhere, neither hurried nor short of breath, with a quiet warmth which would have been pleasant had it belonged to any other conversation.
He allowed the cord to reach its limit and turned. “And who are you supposed to be?”
“Galina Reznikova.”
“Supposed to be?”
“It is my name.”
“A real one?”
“It is the one I gave you.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No.”
He waited for more and received only the soft electrical hiss of the frequency. The generator faltered, and the nearest lamp dimmed until its filament became a trembling orange hook. When the engine recovered, the camp returned in pieces: wet timber, sandbags darkened by rain, canvas shining along the ridges where water had collected, the pale enamel of a mug left beside a drum. Mosquitoes spun through the light in frantic little clouds. Armand looked toward the nearest hut, saw no movement at the windows and brought the handset close again. “You know my name. An impressive evening’s work.”
“I know Clément Aubry’s name too.”
His thumb tightened against the casing before easing. “Sergeant Aubry will be delighted.”
“He doesn’t like his helmet.”
“A great many men don’t.”
“He wears it outside the wire. Inside, he carries it under his left arm.”
Armand passed the radio shack again, careful not to turn his head toward the sergeant’s quarters. “You’ve discovered that soldiers remove their helmets. You’ll have Paris trembling by morning.”
“I don’t think military observation is sorcery.”
“Then we agree.”
“Aubry scratches the bald place behind his right ear when he thinks somebody is lying to him.”
The cord brushed Armand’s wrist. He lifted his arm to free it, continuing at the same pace.
“He uses the middle finger,” Galina continued, “and he presses quite hard. This evening he did it twice while the young sentry at the southern emplacement explained why his rifle sling was wet.”
Armand reached the open edge of the awning. The southern emplacement lay beyond a staggered wall of sandbags, invisible from where he stood except for the upper half of one support post and the torn corner of its rain cover. Earlier, Aubry had crossed the camp with his helmet tucked beneath his arm and returned several minutes later with a particular stiffness about his mouth. Armand had not asked what happened. He now imagined the conversation with unnecessary clarity: the sentry standing upright, Aubry listening, three fingers supporting the helmet while the middle finger of his free hand worried the skin behind his ear. Twice. Galina had counted.
“You’re watching a man scratch himself,” Armand said. “That’s a miserable way to conduct a war.”
“I have seen worse.”
“Nothing so terrible as baldness, surely.”
“Not yet.”
The reply held no threat, and because it held none he could find no reason to laugh at it. He turned earlier than before, losing half a step from the end of his route. The movement brought him under the deeper shelter of the awning, where the crates rose beside him in three uneven columns. Black stencilled letters crossed their sides. One lid had warped at the corner, leaving a narrow darkness beneath it.
Galina said, “Mathieu Sénac should replace his spectacles.”
This time Armand did look toward the medical hut, although only for a moment and only because it stood nearly in front of him when he completed his turn. A dim lamp burned behind its shuttered window. “I’ll pass on your concern.”
“The right arm has pale tape around it. He has wound the tape too thickly, so the spectacles sit crooked.”
“Perhaps you can send him another pair.”
“I don’t know his prescription.”
“Then your intelligence service isn’t everything we feared.”
“He smokes only half of each cigarette.”
Armand let out a low breath through his nose. “A doctor afraid of tobacco. Remarkable.”
“He isn’t afraid of tobacco. He dislikes the heat near his fingers. When the ember comes close, he throws the cigarette away even if there is plenty left.”
The handset had grown damp against his palm. He changed his grip and found that the moisture was his own.
“He fed some of his supper to the yellow dog,” Galina said. “The dog waited beside the back step until he thought nobody was looking. Mathieu took meat from beneath the potatoes and dropped it into the mud.”
“There are dogs everywhere.”
“This one has an injured right foreleg.”
“Most of them are injured.”
“Mathieu keeps bending down to examine it. The injury is old, but the dog doesn’t like him touching the paw. It showed its teeth the second time.”
Armand knew the animal. It had begun appearing after sunset four nights earlier, gaunt enough for the ribs to show beneath its dull coat, the right leg held stiffly whenever it stopped. It fled from most of the men and tolerated Mathieu because he carried food. That afternoon Armand had seen the medic crouched beneath the eaves, murmuring to it while rain streamed from the roof behind his shoulders. The dog had bared its teeth without making a sound, and Mathieu had withdrawn his hand with the solemn respect he might have shown a difficult patient.
“Somebody told you,” Armand said. “Drivers come through here. Labourers, traders, boys selling fruit. Half the town knows about that dog by now.”
“Perhaps somebody told me.”
He had expected denial and had already prepared the contemptuous little sound with which he meant to answer it. Her agreement left the sound lodged uselessly in his throat. He walked beneath the awning again and made himself extend his route to its former length. The mud touched the heel of his left boot. He placed his next step firmly, refusing the inclination to shorten it.
“A man who left here this morning could have told you about Aubry,” he said. “The sergeant has had the same habits for years.”
“That is possible.”
“And Mathieu’s spectacles have been broken for a week.”
“Then many people may have seen them.”
“You admit it.”
“Yes.”
Galina did not sound chastened. She offered the concessions with an ease that made them worthless, accepting each escape he found as though she had known he would need it. Armand had the disagreeable sensation of being helped into his own reassurances. He wanted resistance so he could break it down. Instead, every explanation passed through her hands untouched and came back smaller.
A door opened near the vehicle enclosure. Two men stepped into view, one carrying a metal pail, the other fastening his shirt as they crossed between the huts. Their voices travelled farther than their bodies in the damp air, a complaint about the generator followed by a quiet obscenity when one man stumbled. Neither looked toward Armand. He turned his shoulder, placing the handset between his face and the corrugated wall until they had passed.
Galina waited. “You don’t want them to hear us.”
“I don’t want them to hear you.”
“That isn’t quite the same.”
“You imagine yourself more interesting than you are.”
“Jules Bréval is interesting.”
Armand closed his eyes briefly. “I’m sure he’ll be touched.”
“He was repairing a field receiver this afternoon.”
“He repairs receivers every afternoon.”
“This one made him angry.”
“Most of them do.”
“At fourteen minutes past four, he struck the casing with the heel of his hand.”
Armand remembered the bang from inside the communications shelter, then Jules shouting at the receiver as though it had injured him deliberately. “A technician hitting machinery. Again, your insight overwhelms me.”
“He called it a whore, a traitor and the misbegotten child of a German toaster.”
The laugh reached the back of Armand’s mouth before he caught it. Only a breath escaped, but it carried the shape of amusement, and Galina heard. Jules had indeed called the receiver all three things, his fury growing more inventive as the afternoon went on. The toaster had belonged to a lieutenant in Saigon and had electrocuted Jules mildly enough to leave him unhurt and violently enough to earn his permanent hatred.
“Does he always swear at machinery as if it might become ashamed?” Galina asked.
Armand’s mouth had begun to curve despite him. He flattened it. “Only when the machinery is Russian.”
“That receiver is American.”
“Jules is broad-minded.”
“I like that about him.”
The intimacy of her approval irritated him more than the accuracy of her observation. For one unguarded instant she had not been the invisible woman beyond the perimeter but somebody sharing his opinion of Jules, and Armand had met her there. The laugh, small as it was, had belonged to both of them. He resented her for taking it and himself for offering it.
He walked farther from the wall, allowing the weak light to touch his boots before returning to shadow. “If you spend the entire day staring at Frenchmen through binoculars, I hope Moscow pays overtime.”
Galina’s answer came gently. “I don’t use binoculars for everything.”
The words settled without emphasis. A mosquito whined past Armand’s ear, and he resisted the urge to slap it. He continued to the end of his route, pivoted on his right foot and came back. The stacked crates seemed lower than they had a moment earlier. The corrugated wall seemed thinner. He could feel the portion of his body turned toward the darkness beyond the camp without knowing which portion mattered.
He kept walking.
No report split the night. No impact struck metal or wood. Nothing snapped past his face, and nobody called from the perimeter. The generator coughed and laboured onward. A man inside the nearest hut cleared his throat with a prolonged, painful rasp, spat into a tin and lay down again. Boots scraped on packed soil as a sentry adjusted his footing. Water dripped from one corner of the awning in a patient, irregular rhythm. The enamel mug beside the drum remained where somebody had abandoned it, its handle shining whenever the lamp strengthened.
Armand’s next breath came more easily. If Galina possessed a rifle and a clear view, she had allowed several seconds to pass without using either. The ordinary camp gathered around him and lent his voice a little more substance. “Is that the plan, then?”
“What plan?”
“To bore the French Army into surrender.”
“I hope not.”
“You’re making admirable progress.”
“Thierry Marest cheats at cards.”
Armand’s eyes went at once toward the timber hut beyond the stores, where Thierry and three others had been playing most evenings. The movement was instinctive, completed before he understood that he had made it. Nothing showed at the window tonight. The door was closed, the light behind its seams extinguished.
Galina chuckled softly.
Armand turned back beneath the awning, keeping his face motionless while heat spread beneath his collar. If she saw him, he had confirmed the hut. If she did not, his glance had travelled nowhere and mattered to nobody. He could not decide which thought made him feel more foolish.
“Thierry hides extra cards beneath his thigh,” she continued. “He favours the left because he sits with that side close to the wall.”
“You’ve mistaken resourcefulness for dishonesty.”
“He has done it three nights in succession.”
“Then he must be excellent.”
“He isn’t. The man across from him suspects something, but he watches Thierry’s sleeves.”
Armand knew the player she meant, though he did not say so. René had spent the previous night staring at Thierry’s wrists, convinced that a card vanished whenever Thierry reached for his drink.
“Yesterday,” Galina said, “Thierry dropped the queen of diamonds. He covered it with his boot before anyone noticed.”
“Then you’re welcome to join them. Thierry could use another victim.”
The insult possessed the proper words and none of the proper force. Armand heard the weakness as clearly as if another man had spoken beside him. His voice remained low and controlled, a little too controlled, its edges polished away by the care he took not to be overheard.
Galina probably heard that too.
He moved to the limit of the cord and back, trying to recover the indifference which had come naturally before she mentioned the rifle without naming it. “How long have you supposedly been lying out there? A day? A week? You must have nothing else to do.”
“You think I am lying down.”
“You’d be more comfortable.”
“Perhaps.”
“And where is your comfortable little nest?”
“Somewhere without mosquitoes.”
“Then nowhere within fifty kilometres.”
“You should fasten your collar.”
He almost lifted his hand. The muscles tightened across his fingers before he forced them still, and he turned the aborted gesture into another adjustment of the handset. “Has the glorious Soviet military truly sent somebody thousands of kilometres to study card games and injured dogs?”
“They didn’t send me to study dogs.”
“Cards, then.”
“No.”
“Bald sergeants?”
“I noticed him on my own.”
“How flattering for Aubry. How long have you been noticing us?”
Galina allowed static to fill the space between them. Armand pictured her listening to the question, separating his mockery from whatever hid beneath it, then discarding the words and keeping only the need. When she answered, she gave him nothing he could measure. “Soldiers reveal themselves when they believe nothing important is happening.”
Armand slowed slightly before restoring his pace. “That sounds like something printed in a manual.”
“Would that make it untrue?”
“It would make it dull.”
“Under fire, a man remembers he is a soldier. He remembers where to place his hands and where to look. When he eats, shaves, argues or scratches an insect bite, he becomes himself again.”
“You’ve invented details and added a philosophy afterward.”
“Yes, that is possible.”
He tightened his jaw. “Anybody can invent things after they happen.”
“Yes.”
“Anybody can hear a story about Aubry or Mathieu and claim to have watched it.”
“Yes.”
“You agree very easily.”
“I don’t need you to agree with me.”
Rainwater slipped from the awning and struck the ground beside his boot. He watched the dark spot widen as it soaked into the dust, giving himself that small and harmless object on which to rest his eyes. He could end the conversation. The handset needed only to be returned to its cradle. Another operator would take the next watch, the frequency would be changed again, and Galina Reznikova—if that was her name—would become a story told badly over breakfast. Armand imagined placing the handset down and immediately imagined her voice continuing from it after his hand withdrew, speaking into the shelter where somebody else could hear.
“Aubry changed his shirt,” Galina said.
He looked up from the damp earth.
“He spilled coffee down the first one shortly after sunset. It struck the centre of his chest and ran toward his belt. He removed the shirt outside his quarters because he didn’t want to stain anything inside.”
Armand had seen Aubry cross the camp in a fresh shirt. The cloth was lighter than the one he usually wore, still sharply creased along the sleeves. At the time Armand had assumed the first had been soaked by rain.
“Mathieu moved the yellow dog beneath the medical hut,” Galina continued. “He expects rain.”
Clouds had hidden the moon for most of the evening, but the air smelled newly metallic, the scent of another downpour gathering beyond the hills. Armand looked nowhere. He concentrated on the route beneath his boots, making each turn at the same place.
“Jules repaired the receiver.”
“That would surprise Jules.”
“He hasn’t told anybody yet.”
“He tells everybody when he repairs something.”
“Usually. Tonight he wants them to believe he is still working. He has placed the receiver upright on the bench and draped a cloth over it. When somebody comes inside, he leans over the open toolbox and sighs.”
Armand remembered passing Jules ten minutes earlier. The technician had been seated with both elbows on his knees, staring at the tools scattered between his boots. A cloth covered the receiver. Armand had not asked how the work was going because Jules’s posture appeared to answer for him.
“You can tell him you know,” Galina said. “He will be disappointed.”
“He’s often disappointed.”
“Thierry has stopped playing cards.”
Armand kept his eyes on the ground.
“He is washing his face from a helmet filled with water. He has removed his shirt, but he still has the cards in his trouser pocket.”
The hut toward which Armand had glanced remained dark. He imagined Thierry behind it or beside one of the rain barrels, bending over a helmet while water streamed from his chin. That was not a habit which could have been reported in the morning. It was not a spectacle visible from the road into Kon Tum or something a labourer might have carried away at the end of a day. The longer Armand listened, the more recent her knowledge became, each observation laid over the previous one until there was no room left between her voice and the present moment.
He completed another circuit. The mud no longer touched his heel because he had ceased reaching it. His path had narrowed without decision or announcement, drawing inward one turn at a time. At first he had crossed the whole space between the shelter and the end of the awning, perhaps eight metres. Now he travelled no more than three, turning between the western wall and the nearest stack of crates. The handset cord hung in a deep curve, wound once around his wrist and unwound as he returned. When he reached its limit, the pressure guided him back.
Galina asked, “Does your left leg still hurt?”
His right boot had already planted for the turn. For a fraction of a second his weight remained suspended between both legs, his body almost still, before he forced the left foot forward. Months earlier, metal had entered the outside of his thigh, cutting deep enough to leave the muscle weak and shallow enough for an officer to call the wound fortunate. The scar pulled when he first rose in the morning and ached after long marches, though it had healed cleanly and caused him no obvious limp. When he was tired, he shortened the left stride. Nobody at the camp mentioned it anymore. Most had stopped noticing.
“You have an excellent imagination,” he said.
Galina did not speak of his leg again.
Armand continued the smaller circuit, making the left step longer than comfort required. The correction produced an unnatural rhythm, and after two turns he abandoned it. He reached into his breast pocket and took out a cigarette. The paper had softened in the humidity, bending slightly beneath his fingers. He placed it between his lips, then removed it while searching for a match.
His right trouser pocket was empty. He patted the left, although he already knew the matches were in his jacket inside the shelter. The search gave his free hand something ordinary to perform, and he lingered over it, feeling along the seams before checking the breast pocket from which he had just taken the cigarette.
“Do you intend to recite everyone’s medical records?” he asked.
“No.”
“Good. Mathieu will be jealous.”
“Would you rather hear about yourself?”
Armand stopped the search and held the cigarette between his fingers. “I’ve been wondering when you’d reach the interesting subject.”
It was his best attempt at humour and the least convincing sound he had made all evening. His tongue felt thick inside his dry mouth. He had spent the conversation seeking proof that Galina could see the camp, offering possibilities against it and watching her accept them. That question no longer existed. What remained was smaller, nearer and much harder to ask.
Galina said, “You are twenty-seven.”
“Records.”
“You were born outside Clermont-Ferrand.”
“Records.”
“You have two older sisters. The elder is married. The younger writes to you more often.”
“Stolen records.”
“Your father repairs agricultural machinery.”
“None of this is difficult.”
“You worked in a railway depot before joining the army.”
Armand cut across her. “Files can be taken from an office. Names, ages, families, employment. You don’t need a rifle or a pair of binoculars to read a file.”
“No,” Galina said. “Records can be stolen.”
He waited for the inevitable contradiction, the detail which would prove that some clerk had written his life incorrectly or omitted something she somehow knew. She offered neither. Once again she allowed him the explanation whole, and for one hopeful second it seemed she had exhausted whatever intelligence she possessed.
Then she said, “You have stopped shaving properly along the right side of your jaw.”
The cigarette softened further between his fingers.
“Your shirt is dark down the spine with sweat.”
He could feel the cloth adhering between his shoulder blades, cooling whenever a faint current of air passed beneath the awning.
“Your right boot is unlaced at the top.”
Armand did not look down. That morning the skin beneath the upper eyelet had split and curled inward, rubbing his ankle raw. He had loosened the lace after returning from patrol and never tightened it again.
“The mud is dry along your left trouser cuff,” Galina said. “There is none on the right.”
His left leg moved forward, the discoloured hem appearing at the bottom of his vision before passing behind him.
“Your sleeves are rolled to different heights. The left is lower.”
Armand continued walking. A bead of sweat travelled from beneath his hair and rested against the side of his face. He left it there.
“The cigarette in your right hand is not lit.”
He looked at it.
The movement was no more than the lowering of his eyes, completed before he understood its importance, but it struck him with the force of a confession. The cigarette lay across the first joints of his fingers, pale against skin stained with dust and oil. He could throw it away, yet the act would belong to Galina. He could crush it, pocket it or continue pretending to search for matches, and each choice would arrive only because she had named the object.
Armand put the cigarette between his lips and resumed his circuit as though he had always intended to smoke it later.
“Your rifle is leaning against the corrugated wall,” Galina said. “It is approximately an arm’s length from you when you pass it.”
The rifle had been beside him at the beginning. As his route narrowed, it had fallen behind the point where he turned, near enough to reach in two quick steps and far enough that those steps now seemed conspicuous.
“Your helmet is upside down on an ammunition crate.”
Water left from the rain had collected inside it. He had meant to empty it.
“There is a white cloth tucked partly into your rear pocket.”
He had used it to wipe mud from the handset casing.
“Your left hand is holding the radio.”
His knuckles tightened.
“Your right hand touches the seam of your trousers each time you turn.”
Armand’s fingertips had already found the seam. He forced his hand away, holding it rigid beside his thigh.
Galina paused, long enough for him to hear the generator and the soft drag of his own boot over the ground. “That was better.”
His fingers curled into his palm. The sweat at his temple finally moved, tracing a line toward his cheekbone. She had not merely seen the hand. She had seen his response to being told about it, had watched thought become motion and motion become obedience. The handset seemed to magnify every sound he made: the movement of his tongue, the thin passage of his breath, the faint contact between the unlit cigarette and his teeth.
Armand began looking for her.
He did not fling himself behind the crates or summon the sentries. He continued pacing, keeping the same subdued expression, and let his eyes travel only when the turn placed his face toward the perimeter. The search crossed the southern sandbags first, then the black shapes of huts and the upper edges of the vehicle shelters. Beyond them, the ground disappeared into vegetation. Farther off, a few faint lights toward Kon Tum shone through the damp air and vanished whenever mist thickened between the camp and the town.
He studied rooflines, raised ground and gaps among the trees. The available angles multiplied as he searched. A dark rise which seemed harmless from one step became a possible position from the next. A broken line of foliage could conceal a woman, a rifle or nothing at all. The weakest lights created long regions of blindness outside their circles, while those inside the camp outlined walls, shoulders and faces with an awful generosity. Every lamp was pointed the wrong way.
“Are you looking for someone?” Galina asked.
Armand allowed his eyes to travel once more across the tree line before turning. “I was admiring the scenery.”
“It is very beautiful.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Then enjoy it while you can.”
“I am.”
The dismissal had almost nothing behind it now. Armand could hear the place where its bite ought to have been and knew she could hear it as well. He passed the rifle without taking it. Reaching for it would require him to acknowledge that his empty right hand needed a weapon, and a rifle would be useless while he did not know whether to point it toward the trees, the road, the town or one of the hills reduced by night to a darker shape against the sky.
He let another circuit pass before asking, “Why haven’t you fired?”
The question left him more quietly than he intended. It was the nearest he had come to naming what she was. He waited for the triumphant answer he could already despise: she wanted him frightened; she could kill him whenever she wished; she had spared him for some grand purpose he would be expected to carry back to the others. Any boast would return her to the familiar shape of an enemy propagandist.
“We were talking,” Galina said.
Armand felt the cigarette shift between his lips as his mouth opened. He closed it again.
The answer gave him nothing to resist. She had made no claim of mercy and offered no assurance that the conversation protected him. If speaking was the only reason she had not fired, silence might end that reason; if speaking had nothing to do with it, then the whole exchange was a pastime whose conclusion she alone would choose. He could not even decide whether her answer had been sincere.
A movement crossed the far end of the camp. Aubry passed between two huts in his fresh shirt, carrying his helmet beneath his left arm. He walked behind a line of sandbags and disappeared. Armand had only to call his name. One shout would bring men from the huts, black out the lamps and send every sentry searching the perimeter. He imagined Aubry’s questions afterward, Mathieu watching over the rim of his taped spectacles, Jules standing beside the repaired receiver, Thierry concealing amusement badly enough that everyone saw it. Armand would have to explain that he had spent half the evening whispering to a woman on the radio while she described them one by one, and that he had raised the alarm only after she noticed his unlit cigarette.
He lowered his voice instead. “You talk too much.”
“Do I?”
“Three words would have been enough.”
“Which three?”
“Whatever slogan they gave you.”
“Nobody gave me one.”
“You must have been neglected.”
“Three steps,” Galina said.
Armand’s left foot came down.
“Turn.”
He reached the western wall and pivoted.
“Four steps.”
The return was always longer because the damaged leg shortened itself without his permission. He counted despite trying not to: one with the right, one with the left, one with the right, then the compensating fourth before the crates forced him around again.
“Turn,” she said.
Armand reversed.
“Three steps.”
His body completed the pattern while his mind still resisted it.
“Turn.”
He deliberately continued past the usual point, taking a fourth step and then a fifth into the more open ground beneath the edge of the awning.
“Two extra,” Galina said.
There was no triumph in her voice. She recorded the change as calmly as she had described Mathieu’s spectacles.
Armand turned sharply and went the other way, refusing the old route.
“Now toward the shelter.”
He passed the rifle.
“Closer to the wall.”
He angled away from it.
“You changed direction.”
“I’m walking.”
“Yes.”
He crossed in front of the doorway, forcing the cord to straighten behind him. It dragged against the edge of the corrugated sheet with a faint metallic vibration.
“The roof doesn’t protect the side where you are standing,” Galina said.
Armand stepped away before he understood that he had obeyed. The movement was immediate, his body accepting her warning before pride could reject it. He stopped himself after a single pace, but the correction only made the obedience clearer. She had shifted him through space with one sentence.
He began walking again, slower now, crossing the same three metres as if repetition could erase what had happened. The humiliation burned more cleanly than fear. If she had ordered him to move, he could have refused. She had merely supplied a fact and allowed instinct to command him on her behalf.
“You enjoy this,” he said.
“Talking?”
“Watching men jump.”
“You didn’t jump.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“No.”
“You should be. If you had a rifle on me, you’d have used it.”
Galina said nothing.
Armand pressed on, finding a little sharpness in the words even as his voice remained confined to the space between his mouth and the handset. “A sniper who spends this long talking is either lonely or lying.”
The frequency breathed against his ear. Somewhere inside the communications shelter, a relay clicked. The generator sank into another uneven lull, and the lamps dimmed until the camp seemed to contract around their failing circles. Armand listened for amusement, anger or the smallest defensive movement in her breath.
None came.
The generator recovered, throwing his shadow against the corrugated wall. It showed the rifle behind him, the handset raised to his face and the slender pale mark of the cigarette jutting from his mouth. His shadow’s head reached almost to the edge of the roof. Armand turned slightly, breaking its outline.
Galina began again. “You are standing beside the western wall of the radio shelter.”
He said nothing.
“Your left shoulder is almost touching the metal.”
The corrugations retained a little warmth from the day. He could feel it through his damp sleeve without making contact.
“Your rifle is behind you now. It is farther away than it was before.”
He resisted the need to measure the distance.
“Your helmet is still upside down on the crate.”
Water dripped steadily beside it.
“The cigarette is still between your lips.”
The paper clung to the dry centre of his lower lip.
“Your left hand is gripping the handset very tightly.”
His knuckles had paled beneath the dirt.
“There is sweat running from your right temple.”
The drop reached the line of his jaw.
“Your mouth is slightly open.”
Armand closed it.
“You have stopped pacing.”
Only then did he understand that both boots were planted beneath him. The injured left leg had stiffened slightly at the knee, the right set half a step behind it. The cord hung motionless from his wrist. For the first time since carrying the radio outside, he was completely still.
Galina waited.
The silence lengthened beyond anything conversational. The generator worked on, filling the camp with its low mechanical strain. A mosquito settled on the back of Armand’s hand, its legs nearly weightless against his skin, and he did not brush it away. From beneath the medical hut came a brief scrape, perhaps the yellow dog shifting in the dry earth. A man coughed once behind a wall and turned over on his bunk. The sentries remained at their posts. Aubry did not reappear. Nobody looked toward the western side of the radio shelter.
Armand kept his lips together. He would not mock her again, would not ask another question or offer another explanation for her to accept. He would not tell her that she was bluffing, because she would agree that she might be. He would not ask what she wanted, because every second of the exchange had shown him that his understanding was unnecessary. Most of all, he would not speak merely to break the silence. His voice had already given her enough.
“Your back is to me.”