Burnt Shadows Part 17

Raza shook his head and walked away, each step that put distance between him and Abdullah intensifying the physical pain of grief and loneliness.

'They really are a bunch of walnuts,' the man said as he pushed Raza ahead of him towards the jeep.

25.

By sunset on the fourth day of Raza's absence from Karachi, Sajjad Ali Ashraf had almost resigned himself to another wasted day of back and forth between the port and the fish harbour, asking the fishermen and the truckers if they knew anything of Abdullah the Afghan boy. His only success had been on his second day when he found a trucker at the harbour who remembered the Afghan boy Abdullah, and said he worked with another Pathan Sajjad remembered them faintly, the boy and man who Raza had been talking to when he and Harry exited the fish harbour all those months ago; but the trucker didn't know how to find Abdullah or the other Pathan. 'I see them now and then either here or at West Wharf. Eventually, they'll show up.'

'He won't show up,' Hiroko had said that evening when Sajjad finally gave up for the day and returned home. 'He's gone to a camp near the Afghan border. What are you hoping to find at the harbour, Sajjad?'

'Maybe his friend, the other Pathan, will be there. He might know something more. What do you want me to do, Hiroko? Sit at home playing cards while my son thinks he's in some movie but everyone else around him is carrying real AK-47s and G.o.d knows what else is going on? What will they do when they find out he's lying? Hazara! What is he . . . is he mad? Is he on drugs? These Afghans and their drugs. I'm telling you this Abdullah has put him on drugs.'

So before dawn each day, Sajjad went down to the coast to wait for the Pathan truck driver not even knowing if he'd recognise him again based on just that one glimpse and other truckers' descriptions, but knowing he couldn't go to work in the morning as if everything was all right. All day and into the night he traversed the s.p.a.ce between the fish harbour and West Wharf, his car besieged at both stops by the street urchins to whom he paid a daily sum of money to keep an eye out for the Pathan, though the effect of the much larger amount he'd promised to whoever found the man first resulted in half a dozen false sightings a day and nothing beyond. He couldn't keep this up much longer, he knew. The managing director of the soap factory a relative of Kamran Ali, in whose car Hiroko and Sajjad had driven through Mussoorie, lifetimes ago had been sympathetic when Sajjad had called to explain why he needed some time off, but sympathy only translated into a limited number of days away from the office.

But late on the fourth evening while Raza watched the grimy train window reflecting a face which he looked at with honest distaste Sajjad walked on to the docks at West Wharf. Ships of all sizes were moored in the harbour, the smell of oil more pungent than anything the sea could naturally produce. The bent giant arms of cranes at rest hovered menacingly above the docks. But Sajjad only noticed that finally, finally he had seen someone he recognised. It was Sher Mohammed, Harry's rickshaw driver, shaking his head at a wiry man who was gesticulating in anger.

Sajjad had spent four days in prayer. Religion had never been more than a constant background hum in his life, but he discovered praying was something to do, some ritual in which to pa.s.s the time as he drove back and forth, saw one street urchin after another shake his or her head, no, no, maybe yes but really no, and waited, just waited for deliverance to announce itself. His lips moved constantly, body rocking forward as he recited the 'Ayat-ul-Kursi', having discovered he had none of his mother's talent for finding comfort through conversing with G.o.d as though He were a recalcitrant lover. He could not yell familiarly, familialy, at the Almighty and so he prayed to Him in a language he didn't understand, and felt the rightness of incomprehension when dealing with a power which showed no mercy when Altamash was killed, when Iqbal's wife and children were ma.s.sacred, when Sajjad entered the Consulate in Istanbul, and yet had the mercy to give him a son he hadn't known he'd wanted so desperately until . . . until now, if he were honest. He had loved Raza from the moment he'd first taken the wriggling infant in his arms, but he had also soon grown to take him for granted as Sajjad had always taken the blessings of his life, other than Hiroko, for granted.

But as his brain recognised familiarity in the shape of Sher Mohammed and he remembered that the rickshaw driver had been parked outside the fish harbour when Raza first met the Afghan boy he was overcome by a feeling of grat.i.tude so overwhelming he staggered back with the force of it. For a few seconds he could do nothing but stare at Sher Mohammed, thinking that it was unlikely the answer to a prayer had ever taken a more unexpected form than this little man with only a scattering of teeth still attached to his gums, and an ear-lobe in tatters. He had complete certainty that Sher Mohammed would help him find Raza; it was impossible for his presence here to be anything but an act of Providence.

He would have liked to lower himself on to his knees in grat.i.tude, but there was a puddle of oil-slicked water on the ground and Hiroko would have something to say about it if he came home with a ruined shalwar. So instead he allowed himself a moment to watch the fiery pupil that was the sun staring out at him from the dark eye of oil. I will be a better father after this, he promised. Whatever he wants to do with his life, I will accept.

He was certain there was no one but himself to blame for what had happened. Hiroko had barely spoken these last few days refused to see any of her friends when they came to call and when she did say anything it was to ask, 'What did we do that was so wrong?' She didn't just mean how could he have done something so foolish, but also, how could he have convinced an Afghan boy to go to one of those camps just because he saw it as occasion for his own adventure. Sajjad couldn't bring himself to care about the Afghan boy. He just wanted his son back. He wanted a chance to be a different father Hiroko had done everything a mother could do, was in no way to blame for what had happened. Any faults in Raza were signs of his flaws as a parent. Law school! It seemed so irrelevant now. What did it matter if the boy pa.s.sed an exam or not, became a lawyer or not? Let him be here, be well. Nothing else mattered.

Rainbows bubbled at the edges of the puddle. He wished he could sift them out into his palms and take them home to Hiroko. He'd walk into the courtyard, toss the rainbows up so they'd catch in the limbs of the neem tree and call Hiroko out to sit under the canopy of colour while he told her how he'd found their son through the man with the tattered ear-lobe.

Their first weeks in Karachi together, living in refugee tents, he used to wake up every morning thinking, Will this be the day she decides to go back to the Burtons with their expanse of bookshelves and feather pillows and gardens? So every day became a day to find something of beauty in their strange new home that he could point her towards to say, Look, there's loveliness here, really there is. One day a seash.e.l.l with an ocean roaring behind its pursed lips, one day a cactus flower in bloom, one day a Dilli poet who wrote verses on leaves because he couldn't afford paper (he gave an armful of leaves to Sajjad, and Sajjad pasted them directly on to the inside of their tent, just above the bedroll). In his desperation to make Karachi a place where Hiroko could imagine her life he learnt reasons to fall in love with the city, realising only much later that Hiroko had known what he was doing and had let him do it because she knew he was the one who needed to find ways to imagine a future in this place so removed in its architecture and its air and its pace of life from the city he had wanted to live and die in.

Sajjad touched his heart briefly, and stepped over the puddle.

'Sher Mohammed!' he called out, quickening his pace. 'Sher Mohammed!'

The rickshaw driver was deep in argument with one of the ships' captains responsible for transporting arms to Karachi for transit to the mujahideen. The ISI had been to see the captain, demanding to know why his supply didn't match up to the CIA inventory and though he had given them a line they seemed to accept because it was so often true that the discrepancy must have occurred somewhere earlier in the supply line the encounter had both shaken and angered him. So he now rounded on the man responsible for the discrepancy Sher Mohammed, one of the CIA's local a.s.sets who had previously used the occasion of driving the captain to a CIA rendezvous to convince him no one would notice if a few guns went missing.

'Don't panic. If the ISI didn't believe you you'd be having your fingers broken with a hammer right now,' Sher Mohammed said, as the man paused to draw a breath. 'Is this an attempt to get more money from me? Don't play these games.'

And that's when he heard his name called out in this place where he had never revealed his name.

He turned towards the voice, saw the man with whom Harry Burton was on the most intimate of terms, his 'first teacher', Harry had once called him which Sher Mohammed had taken to mean that the una.s.suming Muhajir in n.a.z.imabad was involved in training CIA agents.

The man was walking towards him with the stride of an executioner, utterly purposeful.

Sajjad saw Sher Mohammed reach into the back of his shalwar and pull out a gun.

What's he doing with that? he wondered.

26.

Hiroko shook her head reprovingly at the cracked skin of Sajjad's heel, the dirt of the harbour that had lodged itself within each groove.

'General manager of a soap factory!' she scolded him, lifting his foot as he lay on the divan, and rubbing a wet cloth vigorously along the length of it before attending to the fissures at the heel. 'And look at me, washing my husband's feet. This is wrong, Sajjad Ali Ashraf. This is wrong.' The last word was whispered, as though her voice itself had gone into retreat, unable to be present at this scene.

She placed the foot gently down on the divan, which had been moved into the centre of the room to make it easier for her to walk around it and wash her husband's corpse. And now it was done. There remained only one last thing she could do for him wind around his body the white sheet on which he was lying before calling in the mourners for one final look at him before the men took him away to be buried.

But Sajjad hated the constriction of sheets, insisted they could only rest lightly upon him as he slept; if he started to feel his feet tangle with the bed coverings he would kick and flail. How often had she been woken up by his kicking and flailing?

There was too much, too much that had been such a part of her life with him that it had become indistinguishable from the mere process of living. She had thought Nagasaki had taught her everything to know about loss but in truth it was only horror with which she had become completely familiar. At twenty-one it had been impossible for her to learn all the facets of loss. She couldn't have known then what it was to lose the man you had loved for thirty-six years.

Sitting on the divan, she touched a finger to the bullet wound in his chest. It seemed so small, so incapable of creating the exodus of blood which had drenched his clothes and skin as he lay in the hospital, waiting for her to claim him. Death had been instan taneous, they said, as if there were relief in that. She did not want death to have been instantaneous; she wanted to have at least held his hand as he lay dying and said goodbye to him in terms other than the, 'Why are you going again? You'll find nothing. Stay. Oh all right, go,' that had been her farewell to him that morning.

Stay. Stay Stay. Stay Stay. She should have repeated it like a madwoman, banged her head against the wall in a frenzy, hit him and wept. She should have said it just one more time, just a little more forcefully. She should have taken his dear, sweet head in her hands and kissed his eyes and forehead. Stay Stay.

His skin so cold, so unyielding, after a night in the hospital morgue. Sweat was running down her back despite the fan which was on full speed right above her head, but he who had always perspired so much more heavily than she was utterly dry. Bone-dry. She was repulsed by the expression.

She could not bear to touch his belly, which had always had such a comfortable softness to it. Instead, she wrapped her hand around his p.e.n.i.s, but the hardness there was even more unbearable than anywhere else. So she moved her hand up to his hair, the only part of him which still felt alive. She closed her eyes, ran her fingers through his hair, whispered endearments in j.a.panese the only words of j.a.panese she ever taught him were words of love.

Neither the closed door and shuttered windows nor her engulfing sorrow could keep out the clamour of the world. Her brother-in-law Iqbal, who flew down from Lah.o.r.e last night after Hiroko said yes, she'd reimburse him for the ticket, had found an extension cord and taken the phone out of this room into the courtyard and she could hear him shouting into it, at Sikandar in Dilli: 'What do you mean you can't get a visa? He's dead. You're my only brother left. What am I supposed to do without Sajjad?'

It was Iqbal who would climb into the grave with Sajjad and close his eyes, not Raza.

She could not think of Raza without being overwhelmed by rage.

Then there was another voice in the courtyard, and she raised herself off the divan. Harry Burton was here. Harry, whose driver Sher Mohammed shot Sajjad the crane-operator who brought Sajjad to the hospital described the whole scene of the killing to Hiroko: Sajjad calling the man's name, the gunshot, the man with the tattered ear-lobes yelling, 'He's CIA,' to the ship's captain before turning to run, both men probably halfway across the ocean by now, the police informed Hiroko.

She wrapped a sheet loosely over Sajjad's lower body and opened the door, and there was Harry, with the lost expression of a little boy. All the gathered mourners stood up as they saw her the men in the centre of the courtyard, the women sitting under the overhang of the roof where there was shade. Hiroko looked only at Harry, beckoned him inside, then stepped across the room to look at the painting of the two foxes while Harry walked over to Sajjad's body and whispered things she didn't try to hear.

'Thank you for coming,' she said, when she heard him walk over to stand behind her.

Harry wanted to embrace her, but didn't. After Hiroko's phone call woke him up early this morning he made call after call to his ISI contacts and the CIA station chief in Karachi, and well before his plane took off from Islamabad he had pieced together, almost precisely, what happened at West Wharf.

'How exactly is it your fault that an irresponsible kid ran off and a thieving son of a b.i.t.c.h panicked and pulled a trigger?' Steve had asked as he drove Harry to the airport, and Harry saw that his colleague was unable to recognise that it was grief, pure grief, not guilt at all, that had unmoored him so completely from his everyday aspect.

'You think because he was Pakistani I couldn't have loved him?' he bellowed, and Steve said, 'h.e.l.l,' and nothing more for the rest of the journey.

But Steve wasn't entirely wrong, he realised now. It was guilt that kept his hands from reaching out to Hiroko, though it made no sense to him that he should feel guilt for this when he hadn't for so many other things which by the standards of ordinary, little-picture morality should have had him sobbing in a bar or some other secular confessional.

'Why did your driver shoot him?' Hiroko asked, turning towards him. 'Why would anyone shoot Sajjad?'

'I don't know.' It was not any act of friendship that had prompted Steve to drive him to the airport, but a professional need to reiterate the importance of giving away nothing that needed to be concealed.

'He thought Sajjad was CIA.' She touched the mole beneath her eye, which had been untouched all day. 'Because of you, I suppose,' and Harry found he wanted her to guess the truth, but she was drifting off. 'Sajjad and I used to joke about that sometimes. We'd joke you were a CIA agent. It's what everyone a.s.sumes of Americans here, you know.' She put a hand to her mouth. 'Do you think Sajjad could have joked about that with Sher Mohammed? And maybe because of it . . . ?' Her voice disappeared again and she shook her head and looked at the corpse, which Harry was deliberately keeping his back towards.

'Maybe,' he heard himself saying. 'Maybe that's got something to do with it.'

In the courtyard the sound of men talking and women muttering prayers stopped, and then a different quality of noise started up. Hiroko paid no attention to it.

It was Raza. He pushed open the front door to feel the word 'home' embrace him for the first time, and then saw the gathering and knew, instantly, that there was no home any more.

His uncle Iqbal was the one who folded him in his arms and whispered in his ear, 'Your father's gone,' and then there was a press of people around him, explaining in words that were disjointed because no one truly understood yet. But Raza heard, 'And then he shouted, "He's CIA," ' and he knew this was Harry Burton's doing.

He pushed aside the mourners, and entered the room where his father's body lay.

At first he wanted to laugh. It was a joke. Death couldn't look so exactly like sleep. But when he shook Sajjad by the shoulder, the body was ice, and there was a puncture above his heart.

'Raza,' Harry said, because Hiroko seemed incapable of stepping forward and taking her weeping son in her arms.

Raza was kneeling at the divan, clutching his father's cold shoulder, but at Harry's voice he stood, turned and raced forward, fists flying. Harry had him pinned on the floor in seconds.

'You did this!' Raza shouted. 'You killed my father.'

'Raza Konrad Ashraf!' Hiroko pushed Harry away and dragged her son to his feet. 'What bad manners are these?'

'Ma, you don't know.' He caught hold of Harry's shirt. 'They told me all about you at the camps. He's CIA. He's been lying to us all along. Aba's dead because of him.'

Harry took Raza's fist which was gripping his shirt and squeezed it.

'He's dead, you idiot, because he went to the harbour looking for you.'

Raza reeled back. Somewhere in the explanation out in the courtyard, this detail missed him. He looked to his mother, and Hiroko saw that he would be haunted now, by this, for the rest of his life. He was too young for such pain, just a boy, her little boy. She held open her arms and he rushed into them.

Harry said, 'Hiroko,' and she shook her head, turning away so that even his shadow was out of her sight. He allowed himself to look at Sajjad for a moment one long moment in which he saw the best part of his childhood and himself lying dead and then he left.

Hiroko's hands stroked Raza's back and hair, her eyes resting on Sajjad. It was nearly sunset. Soon they would take him away. She had only these minutes left now to remember every detail the swoop of his collarbone, the tiny scar on his knuckle, the veins at his wrist.

The Speed Necessary to Replace Loss New York, Afghanistan, 20012

27.

Kim Burton pushed the tip of her tongue between the gap in her front teeth. Manhattan's downtown skyline gaped back at her. She sc.r.a.ped her tongue along the sharp edge of a tooth. Jagged metal debris, eight storeys high. Three months on, everything was still reminder or testimonial. Thirty storeys above Mercer Street, it was possible now to stand at this window in her grandmother's apartment, twelve feet across and four feet high, and look straight ahead without any human construction encroaching on the view. Instead, so much sky outside it could have been Montana.

She cranked open the small side window smoker's window, her father called it and dipped her head so she was looking down at the street, watching the thin stream of human traffic: graveyard shift workers returning home to lovers for a few precious minutes of shared sleep; NYU students bouncing with whatever stimulant was carrying them through the sleepless nights of finals week; a man carrying two buckets overflowing with flowers, their scent making him weep for a faraway country; a pair of transvest.i.tes, arms looped around each other's waist, their stiletto heels keeping perfect time just as their boots had done in their former lives as military men.

From this far up, it was possible to overlay any story on to the tiny figures below. Kim liked to think her stories revealed a certain largeness of spirit, though she suspected each one could be traced back to something she'd seen on television in the preceding week.

Her eyes shifted their focus from the world outside to the window, and she grimaced at the angular face captured in the gla.s.s. Green eyes dulled with exhaustion, jet-black hair being overtaken by the copper roots long enough that she felt she should start calling them stalks, skin so pale and circles under her eyes so dark she was beginning to look less human than lunar. Red-eye flights, coffee and dreams of collapsing buildings weren't the best of combinations for a glowing complexion.

Looking away, she reached into the s.p.a.ce behind the radiator, and extracted a packet of cigarettes and a little silver skull which opened its jaws and blew out a steady flame when she depressed its occipital bone. She had carried this lighter through her life for nearly twenty years now, since one of the Marine guards at the Emba.s.sy in Islamabad with whom she'd conducted a minor flirtation to irritate her father had given it to her as a farewell present. Once she had the lighter it was necessary to take up smoking. Later that year, Grandpa James had found her lighting up in the back garden of his house in London and said, 'I suppose your grandmother encouraged you to do that just to annoy me.' It seemed to give him a measure of satisfaction to think he was still significant enough to Elizabeth he never called her Ilse to prompt her into such behaviour, though they hadn't met since Kim's parents' wedding.

She took a drag on her cigarette and found herself wondering what Grandpa James would make of the world if he were still alive. Would his air of condescension about all things American other than Lauren Bacall and his granddaughter have diminished or augmented over the last few months? Would he still look with dismay at Harry's life and wonder which of its wrong turns he could have forestalled, which of its failures bore the stamp of DNA? And what would he make of Gran's flatmate, whose late husband's name had only to be mentioned to cause him to change the subject with an air of guilt that was otherwise quite absent from his life?

'Spare cigarette?'

Kim's body jerked; a spark landed on her black T-shirt and burnt away, unnoticed.

'Since when do you smoke?'

'Since 1945. Thanks to an American in a Tokyo bar.'

Laughing, Kim handed Hiroko her cigarette.

'Take this. I've quit. Who was the American?'

'Just a GI.' Hiroko lowered herself on to the sofa, and saluted smartly. 'When did your flight get in? I thought you weren't leaving Seattle until this afternoon.' She dragged on her cigarette and exhaled very slowly in the careful manner of someone having her only smoke of the year.

'Meeting got moved up to today so I took the red-eye,' Kim said, carefully watching the other woman.

There was a certain frailty about Hiroko that hadn't existed three and a half years earlier when she first entered this apartment with a manner that suggested she knew she was late by about half a century but that she would be forgiven for it. Surely it was ridiculous, Kim told herself, not to accept a certain brittleness of someone Hiroko's age. And yet it was hard to give credence to such a thought there was something so youthful in her posture, legs tucked under her body, elbow resting on sofa-back while her hand propped up her chin and a cigarette glowed between two fingers. The shadows in her corner of the unlit apartment conspired to make it seem just a short-circuiting of the mind to think this woman in silk pyjamas with stylishly short hair was seventy-seven years old.

Kim switched on a lamp and shallow lines etched themselves all across Hiroko Ashraf's face. The mole which used to rest above her cheekbone had slipped, just slightly. But the single green streak in her ivory hair attested to that which hadn't changed at all: her continued willingness to enter into new experiences without too much concern for whether anyone else might consider it either foolishness or frivolity.

'What's the meeting about? I thought you'd negotiated everything about moving to the New York office?'

'Oh, there's always something else to iron out,' Kim said, stretching her lean body, trying to get rid of the kinks that remained from the flight. 'But it suits me fine to be here. The run-up to Christmas is the time for exes to get in touch and suggest giving things one last try and G.o.d knows I don't need another one of those conversations with Gary. You do know I'm staying on until after Christmas, right?

'Just because you're terrible at communicating with everyone you've ever lived with doesn't mean your grandmother and I have the same problem.' Hiroko smiled. 'Of course I know. And I'm delighted.' She gestured towards the early-edition newspaper splayed on the coffee table next to Kim's half-empty mug. 'What's going on out in the world?'

'The last fire has almost burnt out.' Kim pointed in the direction of the looming emptiness outside before coming to sit down on the sofa.

'That's not the world, it's just the neighbourhood,' Hiroko said sharply.

Kim's eyebrows rose.

'Right,' she said, voice heavy with irony. 'Just a neighbourhood fire.'

Hiroko raised a hand in apology.

'Sorry, I didn't mean it that way.'

Kim took hold of her hand and squeezed it lightly.