Charlie Johnson in the Flames by Michael Ignatieff

take him in. He was asking people to make a lot of allowances, Etta and now these two, and he didn’t like what it said about his state of mind, his eerie helplessness. Charlie was going to say all this, but it was too late, for the lights picked out the barn and the white house and now they rolled up to the gravel in front of the door and there in the open doorway, leading back into the kitchen, stood Jacek’s wife.
    Her hair was up, and she was wearing jeans and what looked like one of Jacek’s checked shirts and a pair of white socks on her feet. She had glasses on the end of her nose and she had been cooking. Early forties, he thought. All Jacek ever said about her was that she trans lated books for a living, ran the farm and was, as he put it once, with fine philosophical precision, ‘the principle of my existence’. The minute he saw her Charlie felt bad, for she looked at him with the same appraising look as Etta, only Etta was probably back in London by now and wouldn’t want to see him again. Charlie stood there in the kitchen, mute with longing.
    Magda poured them vodka and they drank by the pots simmering on the stove, under a red light, and Jacek said something to her in Polish. Magda looked at Charlie – gaunt, unshaven, a shirt-tail sticking out, and a stain of vomit on his trouser leg – and said, ‘We have a case of post-traumatic stress disorder.’ She pronounced the syllables with ironic distinctness, as if to distance herself most of the way, but not entirely, from these American notions. Charlie smiled.
    â€˜I don’t see it like that,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t want to go home.’
    â€˜Why not?’ she asked.
    â€˜Because I’m not ready,’ he replied.
    â€˜So we will get you ready,’ she said. On that basis, he could see, she could have him here without betraying his wife. Charlie thought he deserved praise for such intuition about the way women’s ethical principles worked.
    Magda drank her vodka and then disappeared into another room, reappearing with some cotton wool, adhesive and disinfectant. ‘For your hands.’ He patted his pockets, looking for something, and realised that he had left the Navy pills at the hotel. So here he was, the man he impersonated sometimes but really disliked, the helpless guy. It dawned on him that Etta had been right as usual, he was worse than he thought. But it was too late for Etta now.

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    M agda cut the dressings off his hands and examined the wounds carefully in the light over the kitchen table. The pads of the fingers and the base of both palms were the worst. Charlie looked at the suppurating red zones without interest, but she bent over, sniffed them and made a face. She gripped his hands tightly to hold them still and cleaned each sore with a Q-tip dipped into disinfectant. It hurt and he felt like a kid sitting there across from her watching the intent way she worked. She was a fine-looking woman, Charlie thought, especially the nape of her neck, from the collar of her checked shirt up to the wisps of brown hair that hung down from her hair clip. Charlie wanted to lean forward and kiss her, startle her with the force of his lips against hers. This was not a great idea, with his best and truest friend sitting with a drink in his hands, watching them both from across the room. It was a bad sign to be so susceptible. He was just a bundle of longing, he thought, and it was disreputable to be so. She applied some ointment to the burns and then re-wrapped both hands in bandages. She even took his temperature, and when she took the thermometer away from his lips she said that if he was still like that in the