"Johnny, I just feel that-"

"No, really. It's helping. I know it sounds sort of inquisitorial. A torture, agony, all that. But it just gets everything..." He scooped the air with his hands. "Fizzed up. I feel so much better than I did." He yawned. "Makes me a bit fuzzy though, for an hour or two."

"Well, you look good," she said, striving for a chirpy bonhomie. "Have you had your hair cut? You look a bit thinner, somehow."

They talked on. After the ECT, John said, they wanted to give him lithium, to keep him stable. He was looking forward to being on lithium, he said, it was the fluctuating of moods that got him down. He wanted to talk only of himself, she realized, his illness, his prognosis.

"I thought I might come down to Knap for a while," he said. "Get my sea legs."

She thought: no. No you won't. I don't want you there. Then she felt ashamed.

"Of course you must," she said, a weakness overcoming her. She was thinking: I thought we were meant to be separated. I don't want to- "The docs think that it'd be useful-"

"Please don't call them the 'docs,' Johnny."

"Oh. OK." He looked hurt. "Sorry. Dr. Phene thinks I'll need some peace and quiet."

"Of course." She made an effort. "Great. Well, there's masses of peace and quiet at Knap. No shortage of that. Stroll by the lake, that sort of thing."

"Lake?"

"The lake by the old manor...where you dug the trenches."

He pulled down the corners of his mouth as he thought.

"A lake?" he said. "Are you sure? I don't remember a lake."

ECT.

I enjoy the beach in bad weather too. The waves hammer in, hurling themselves at the sand, the pines and the palm trees sway and thrash. Falling coconuts hit the beaten ground beneath them with a noise like a wooden mallet on a paving stone. Soft and bard at the same time. I take my longest walks in such windy, rainy weather, three miles south to where the mangrove creeks begin, where the silt from the Cabule gives the green water a curious mauve tinge. Then I turn and walk home. Out at sea enormous electrical storms flicker and pulse, too far away for me to bear the thunder.

The theory behind electroconvulsive therapy is that psychopathic behavior is caused by aberrant brain patterns. By submitting the brain to electric shocks of 70 to 150 volts, muscular contractions are provoked in the cortex that unsettle the psychopathic patterns and allow healthier ones to take their place. During the treatment the patient might spontaneously urinate, defecate or even ejaculate. Possible side effects include panic, fear, memory loss, personality change and poor concentration.

There is no satisfactory explanation of just how this ECT is meant to work. In medical parlance the treatment remains "empirical."

Ian and I sat in the back of the Land-Rover along with seven of the boy-soldiers. We faced each other, wedged against the cab, farthest away from the open back with its juddering ochre square of receding landscape. Through the rear window of the cab I could see Amilcar and the driver. I felt cramped and uncomfortable and very hot. We were driving on a dirt road and were thrown about as we bounced over ruts and potholes. I had no idea where we were going: we had driven back up the road in the direction of Grosso Arvore for a few miles, and had then turned off onto this track, which seemed to be leading us roughly north-east. Amilcar had a map spread out on his knee, but I could not make out any details through the dusty window.

The boys in the rear with us did not speak a great deal to each other. Their expressions were solemn and serious, and their remarks to each other terse and to the point. Not all of them were armed; there were only five Kalashnikovs for the seven of them. One of the boys had a bandaged arm and they all looked tired. They reminded me of a photograph I had seen once of a group of passengers rescued from a sunken liner or ditched aircraft, sodden, sitting huddled in blankets, exhausted, faces set and eyes lowered, showing nothing of the exhilaration of rescue, all chastened instead by whatever ordeal they had been through in the water. These boys conveyed the same sense of having undergone such a profound experience. Perhaps that was why they were behaving with such propriety toward us. I could hardly believe we were hostages; we were treated more like guests.

I glanced over at Ian, opposite me. He appeared upset and preoccupied, and he was chewing nervously on his lips. There were white flecks of dry saliva at the corners of his mouth. I caught his eye, and gave him a slight smile. He nodded briefly and then looked away.

I shifted my position, bumping against the boy on my right. He was the one in shorts and big boots who had flagged us down. His thin brown thigh was pressed against mine. He had long delicate fingers, curled around the chipped and scratched gunmetal of his Kalashnikov's barrel. He gave a faint smile of apology and told the boy next to him to move down. The row shuffled and rearranged itself. I gained an inch or two of extra space.

I considered myself; analyzed how I felt. My shoulder was still sore, but I was not frightened. I was tense, certainly not at ease, but these lanky boys with their rationed guns and the diminutive Dr. Amilcar did not frighten me.

I looked across at Ian again. He was leaning forward, elbows resting on his knees, head hanging, the very picture of a man in decline. Dr. Amilcar had never once mentioned the words hostage or prisoner or kidnap. Somehow that refusal to classify us made me less worried. I had a strange confidence that we would remain unharmed.

I thought of Mallabar briefly. Of what had taken place in the forest; of what he had tried to do to me. In a way he was responsible for my current plight. If I hadn't fled the camp, if Ian's Land-Rover hadn't been delayed departing.... The "if" clauses wound backward through my life toward the day of my birth, tracing my personal route through the forking paths of happenstance and whim, my selections, willed and unwilled, from the spread deck of infinite alternatives and choices that the world and its time offered. I could hardly blame Mallabar.

We drove on for another two hours on a succession of small bush tracks. The land was dry and bleached and the road surface friable and powdery. Often the view through the rear was nothing but an opaque screen of khaki dust. I considered that from the air, we would be visible for miles, trailing this plume-this nebulous spoor-behind us. I thought suddenly of Usman, Usman in his Mig in the pale blue upper reaches of the sky, looking down on this corner of Africa and seeing our wedge of red dust inching across the landscape....

I smiled to myself as we bumped and bucked along-we were traveling as fast as possible-and I felt my sweat run down my sides beneath my shirt. I hit the warm yielding shoulder of the boy on my right, and then the hard frame of the cab on my left as we swayed and shook in unison. Ian Vail looked up and caught my eye. His features were drawn, like a man who has had no sleep, and his lips were so dry they were beginning to crack.

"Are you all right, Ian?" I asked.

He nodded. I could see his tongue working behind his cheeks, trying to coax some lubricating saliva from his parched glands.

"We'll be OK," I said. "I'm sure."

Ian nodded again and looked down.

When we stopped we had driven continuously for over four hours. The boys clambered stiffly out of the cab and went into a huddle around Amilcar. We were allowed out of the Land-Rover. I rubbed my numb buttocks and stretched and stamped. I felt curiously serene, distanced from what was happening to me, as if I were taking each minute, each second and observing it dispassionately for whatever information it might yield.

Ian, I could clearly see, was occupying a different pole of experience. For him each tiny division of time passing was pressing down on him as a further weight, a burdensome reminder of his plight, a growing freight of potential danger and hurt. He looked stooped and wordless, suddenly a smaller, frailer man, all his efforts devoted to maintaining the functioning of key components of his body-heart, lungs, blood flow, musculature. All that was important to him now was that he should not collapse.

Amilcar led us over to the shade of a small mango tree and invited us to sit down. He was courteous and firm. We sat cross-legged on the earth with two boys to guard us and watched him and the others climb aboard the Land-Rover and set off once more.

A few flies hummed around us. I looked up into the dark center of the tree above my head but saw there was no fruit. I would have liked a mango, to have sunk my teeth into its juicy yellow flesh. But it was not the season. After the rains, if they ever came. My stomach rumbled and I felt my hunger shift inside me like something alive.

I looked around at the countryside, trying to divert my attention from my appetite. We had left the savannah and were now in a flat terrain of bush and thin forest. The track we had been driving along was old and partially overgrown. I could see no hills in the distance, only a milky haze. The green slopes of the Grosso Arvore escarpment were far away. It felt warmer and stickier here too. If we kept heading north or northeast, I reasoned, trying to recall the geography of the country, we would soon reach the myriad watercourses and tributaries of the Musave River, beyond whose far bank was the frontier. Around it were thick forests and acres of marsh and mangrove. A detailed map I had once seen had shown a tormented writhing of silted creeks and dead-end lagoons, oxbow lakes and seasonal mud flats....

I tried to remember other information. There had been some oil exploration in the delta, I thought, before the civil war. And some policy of retraining the local fishermen to grow rice, to which end marshes had been drained, rivers diverted, irrigation systems installed. Whatever had been achieved would have been undone by the war, in any event. And farther up the Musave, I seemed to recall, was a huge copper mine run by a Belgian company.

The Musave River Territories were the main source of UNAMO manpower and the thick jungles and mangrove-clotted waterways of the river were the original UNAMO heartland. I looked over at our two guards. They were dark-skinned, long-necked boys with small, round heads. The people from the River Territories were ethnically of different stock from the rest of the country, and Christians too, I seemed to remember.

I felt frustrated and angry with myself. UNAMO. UNAMO...who were they? What were their objectives? Hadn't Alda told me they had been defeated by an alliance of the federal army and FIDE? There had been a big battle, Alda had said-it seemed like years ago now-so who was Dr. Amilcar and where was he taking us? Was this a fleeing remnant of the destroyed UNAMO army, or some kind of flying column, an insurgent force?

Ian tapped me on the arm.

"I need to pee," he said.

"Well..." I felt a squirm of irritation inside me. What did he expect me to do about that? "Why don't you ask the boys?"

He looked at me as if I were mad. "The boys? Jesus..." He stood up and indicated his need to them. They only let him move a few paces away. He turned his anguished face toward me.

"Go on," I encouraged. "For heaven's sake, Ian."

He urinated, head bowed, the patter of his water crackling on the carpet of dead mango leaves. He shivered and buttoned his fly. He came back and sat down in silence, his face distorted with embarrassment.

"We've got to get used to this," I said, consolingly. "We have to be more...relaxed with each other."

"I know," he said. He reached out and squeezed my hand. "Thanks, Hope. I'm sorry. This...it's just taken the wind out of my sails, rather. I'm so-" He stopped. "I'll pull myself together."

"I really don't think they want to hurt us," I said. "They're just kids."

"The kids are the worst," he said fiercely. "They don't care. Don't give a damn what they do." He was shivering; his voice was a rasping whisper.

"Not this lot, surely," I said.

"Look what they've got written on their fucking jackets! Atomique Boum. What the fuck does that signify? Some kind of commando? Some kind of death squad?" He was beginning to panic.

"For Christ's sake." I stood up. The two boys were lounging at the fringe of the shade cast by the mango tree. They were talking quietly to each other, their weapons on the ground, their backs half turned away from us. I walked over to them.

"Where has he gone, Dr. Amilcar?" I said. They spoke briefly to each other in a language I did not recognize. I suspected only one of them spoke English. One had understood me. Beneath each eye were three small vertical nicks-tribal scars.

"For gasoline," he said. "Please to sit down."

I pointed at the other one's tracksuit top.

"What does this mean?" I asked. "Atomique Boum."

"Volley." He smiled.

"Sorry?"

"It is our game. We play volleyball. We are the team Atomique Boum."

"Ah."

I felt an odd subsidence in my gut, a hollow feeling that made me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

"It's a good game," I said. Lost in Africa, prisoners of an armed volleyball team.

"Very good," he agreed.

Then the other one said something, more sternly. The boy with scarred eyes smiled apologetically, and motioned for me to return to my place. I rejoined Ian. Anxious Ian.

"Relax," I said. "We've been captured by a volleyball team."

Dr. Amilcar came back after an absence of about an hour and a half. We all climbed into the rear of the Land-Rover to discover our space was to be shared with five jerrycans of petrol. It was a much tighter squeeze. We set off once more, still heading north.

We stopped before sunset and made camp. The boys lit a small fire and cooked up a kind of grainy porridge, yellowy gray in color with a bland, farinaceous taste. I ate mine with some enthusiasm. Ian began to eat, but then had to go behind the Land-Rover to shit. I felt confidently costive, my bowels locked solid. I went to urinate, though, just to show Ian I was sharing his discomfort. I walked out a little way into the bush, accompanied by a boy. He stood a discreet few yards away in the gathering gloom as I lowered my trousers and pants and squatted down behind a bush, feeling dry grass stems scratch my buttocks. When I came back, Ian asked me needlessly and solicitously if I were all right.

Throughout the day, Amilcar had pointedly kept himself to himself, rarely talking to us. Now, after we had eaten, he wandered over to join us, with two blankets under his arm, which he handed to us. Then he took off his spectacles and cleaned them with a scrap of chamois leather. His eyes were small and slightly hooded, and without his glasses he looked more innocent, the goatee suddenly something of an affectation and not, along with his spectacles, a symbol of his intellect.

He sat down cross-legged, facing us.

"There's a problem tonight," he said, reasonably. "My boys have to sleep-they're exhausted. So I can't guard you. But-" He paused. "I don't particularly want to tie you up."

"I promise we won't try to escape," I said at once. "You don't need to worry."

"Hope!" Ian rebuked me, outrage driving his voice high.

"Come on, Ian," I said, exasperated at him. I gestured at the bush. It was black like a wall, alive with insect noise. "You going to run off into that?"

Amilcar watched us bicker. "You could run," he said. "I wouldn't come to look for you. I think you would die."

"We won't run," I said.

"Why have you kidnapped us?" Ian demanded sharply. "We've got nothing to do with anyone. The government, UNAMO, nobody."

I felt it was time that I showed some signs of agreeing with Ian, so I said, frostily, "Yes. Exactly."

Amilcar pouted his full lips, thinking.

"Actually," he said slowly, "I don't know. Maybe I should have left you at the road?" He stroked his beard. "Maybe I thought if we met federal troops it would be useful...." He shrugged. "When we get to the front line, I'll probably let you go."

I looked at Ian as if to say: see?

Amilcar stayed on talking to us. He was in a loquacious mood and told us quite candidly what had happened and what his plans were.

He had been cut off from the main column of UNAMO forces in the south after the heavy fighting at Luso. It had been a running fight, he said, rather than a battle. Nobody could claim a victory. He and the Atomique Boum team had spent the last weeks laboriously making their way back to base. We were indeed heading for the Musave River Territories, much faster now thanks to the Land-Rover. It was still a difficult journey. The UNAMO enclave in the River Territories was currently being attacked by two columns of troops: the federal army and some FIDE units.

"What about EMLA?" I said.

"They are in the south, far in the south. FIDE thinks, you see, if they finish us in the north, then they can return to the south with the federals and finish EMLA."

"Will they?"

"No. But maybe they will attack EMLA later in the year. I don't care. I only care about UNAMO. The others are worthless. Everyone is paying for them-America, Russia, South Africa. Only UNAMO is independent. Truly."

"But after Luso?"

"So they caught us a bit there. And so we retreat, to rearm and reequip." He smiled broadly, showing his teeth. "Reculer pour mieux sauter. You understand?"

I congratulated him on his French. Then he spoke a few sentences to me in French and I realized he was in fact virtually fluent. I admitted defeat and felt foolish. Amilcar told us he had studied at the Faculte de Medecine at the University of Montpellier for three years before completing his studies in Lisbon, after he won a state scholarship there.

"But I came home when the war started," he went on. Before I could finish my internship." The disappointment appeared momentarily on his face. He had organized and worked in field hospitals for the UNAMO columns for two years before steady attrition had necessitated his own move into the guerrilla army.

"I was at Musumberi," he said, "for six months. There were many refugees and we had a school there. When I wasn't working in the hospital I was the coach for these boys." He gestured at them, most of them now curled in blankets around the embers of the fire. "My volleyball team. They are good players." He stopped. "But now they are tired. And they are depressed. Two of their fellows were shot three days ago. We were surprised in a village, and when we were running away..." He didn't finish. "It's a team, you see? And these boys were the first ones we have lost."

He paused, reflecting, making little clicking noises with his tongue. He looked up and scrutinized us both.

"It was a mistake. To bring you. I'm very sorry. But now you have to stay on for a few days only."

"Well..." I was about to say something consoling but I glanced at Ian. His face was set tight, full of frustration and anger.

"You are both working at Grosso Arvore?" Amilcar asked. "With the monkeys?"

"Chimpanzees. Yes," I said.

"With Eugene Mallabar?"

"Yes."

"A great man. He has been a great man for this country."

Amilcar wagged a finger at us. "So, are you both doctors?"