Burnt Shadows Part 18

'What's the matter, Roko?'

It seemed impossible sometimes, Kim Burton's blindness. And yet more impossible to hold anything against a woman of such genuine warmth and charm, all the most appealing parts of Konrad, Ilse and Harry right there in the pressure of her fingertips, the concern in her open, guileless face, her desire to know what exactly it was she'd got wrong this time. Hiroko had quite fallen in love with her within minutes of their meeting.

'Stupid posturing men, that's the matter. As ever,' Ilse Weiss said, walking out of her bedroom. She stopped beside the antique globe which rested on the drinks cabinet, and spun it slightly so the continents slid westwards and the unpart.i.tioned ma.s.s of India was beneath her fingertips, HINDOOSTAN HINDOOSTAN stamped across it. Very faint, the border which Harry had inked in when he was a young boy, to whom an outdated globe was a useless artefact. stamped across it. Very faint, the border which Harry had inked in when he was a young boy, to whom an outdated globe was a useless artefact.

'You're looking well, Gran.'

Ilse snorted, and came to sit between Hiroko and Kim, slapping down the leg Kim was resting on the coffee table.

'At ninety-one the best you can hope for is to be well preserved. Which is just a synonym for looking pickled.'

True enough, Hiroko thought, not unkindly. But despite the gauntness that had once been a striking angularity, and the ma.s.s of wrinkles which called to mind the topographical map of a particularly varied terrain, Ilse's aspect carried such a powerful memory of beauty with it that people still stopped to stare, and to imagine what might be revealed if you could only peel layers of time from her face.

'I thought you said you were going to be dead by morning.'

Ilse smiled, turning to Hiroko.

'It's not quite morning yet.'

Hiroko caught Ilse's wrist, pressed down against its veins.

'Well, you have no pulse that I can detect. Perhaps we both died, and this is the what comes after. And Kim's come visiting!'

'Nonsense. I'll get there before you. Like Delhi, like here.' She removed the cigarette from between Hiroko's fingers and took one short drag, before blowing out a strand of smoke with a schoolgirl's smile of transgression. 'But, you know, last night I really did feel that I'd be dead by morning.'

'You feel that at least twice a week,' Hiroko grumbled, retrieving her cigarette.

'Well. Eventually I'm bound to be right.' She tapped a finger on her granddaughter's knee. 'Don't tell her about fires burning out as though that's the world's most significant event. She thinks Pakistan and India are about to launch themselves into nuclear war.'

's.h.i.t,' Kim said. 'Sorry, Hiroko.'

'And don't say "s.h.i.t", Kim. If you must swear, say "f.u.c.k". It has a certain savage elegance to it.'

She said it primarily to amuse Hiroko enough to distract her but Hiroko only exhaled smoke, watching the cloud ama.s.s in front of her.

Ilse knew that look in her friend's eyes. It had been there, lurking beneath the thrill of arrival, when Hiroko had come to New York in 1998. 'Both times you've entered my home it's been nuclear-related. Once was acceptable; twice just seems like lazy plotting,' Ilse had said, with mock asperity, but that look of Hiroko's the one that was back again had told her that the bomb remained the one thing in the world she would not laugh about.

Hiroko extinguished the half-smoked cigarette, and traced wings of ash on the ashtray with its tip.

'Any news from Harry? Raza hasn't been in touch in a few days.'

In the decade the two men had been working together she'd been grateful to have an alternate conduit of information about Raza's life through Ilse, and Harry himself. Prior to that, in those first few years after Sajjad's death, months would sometimes go by without any word about him. She had a.s.sumed at first he was angry with her or had just grown uncaring, but whenever they did speak or meet he was as devoted as ever so she saw that it wasn't lack of love that made him stay away, but something else, some guilt she brought out in him. Guilt about his father's death. Guilt, perhaps, about his own life, she sometimes wondered, but what was there to be guilty about?

Perhaps she wasn't enthusiastic enough about his profession, and he thought there was a judgement in there. It wasn't a matter of judgement she just wished she could understand why two men as intelligent as Harry and Raza would choose to work in 'the administrative side of private security' how much satisfaction could there be in overseeing the surveillance systems of banks and a.s.signing bodyguards to people of influence? At one point she had thought it was just another cover for working with the CIA, and the thought of Harry pulling Raza into that world had so incensed her she made both men swear on Sajjad's grave that it wasn't true. They had both looked so ashen as they swore, she'd known they weren't lying. Then Ilse had firmly said, 'Harry's no longer with the CIA. I'd know if he was lying about that' and there was no question of asking Ilse to swear on anyone's grave. She always said total honesty was one of the gifts of old age.

If only he was happy. That was all she had ever wanted for him. Perhaps that was an aspiration he felt he could never live up to. She pressed her hand against her heart sometimes just thinking about him made her feel a crushing sense of devastation, quite out of proportion to the circ.u.mstances of his life.

Kim said, 'I can't even remember the last time Dad called me.' She did remember it, of course. She always remembered. 31 October. He'd been in one of his nostalgic moods, recalling the Halloween she dressed up as World Peace sticking maps of the world on to her clothes and a peace sign over each map. Except, she missed the third p.r.o.ng of the peace sign so instead she was, as Harry pointed out, World Mercedes-Benz. He laughed about it over the phone and Kim, wishing she could just laugh, so glad to hear his voice, found herself saying, 'You only pointed it out months later when you saw the pictures. You weren't there when it happened. As always.' Too often around her father, she couldn't stop being a teenager either in adulation or sullenness. And so she ensured he wouldn't call again for a very long time. Though perhaps he wasn't calling because she had a fairly certain idea of where he and Raza were, and he didn't want her to know, but he could never lie to her without getting caught out.

'I spoke to Harry yesterday,' Ilse said. She gave her granddaughter a slightly disapproving look. 'It does work to call him, you know. You shouldn't always wait for him to make the effort.' When there was no response to this other than a shrug she addressed herself to Hiroko. 'They're both fine. He didn't say where they are, but there's no need for you to start thinking they're in India or Pakistan. They could very well be on their way back to Miami.' That was where their company's head office was, but a few weeks ago they'd both said they were travelling on a year-end junket to see various clients in different parts of the globe, and satellite phones would be the only way to contact them until further notice. Only Hiroko had believed this line.

Hiroko's nod lacked all conviction.

'I've tried calling Sajjad to ask him what's going on along the border, but I can't get through to him.'

'Perhaps you need a better medium. Sajjad's been dead for years. Oh Hiroko, you can't go senile before me. You promised.'

I wish I were old, Kim thought, watching the two women. Really old. Old enough to have left everything troublesome behind careers, lovers, regrets. Fathers. Mothers. Were you ever old enough for that?

Hiroko patted Ilse's arm.

'I don't mean my Sajjad. His nephew Iqbal's youngest son.'

'Iqbal? Oh yes. The dissolute brother. I saw him once he came to Bungle Oh! to tell Sajjad their father had died. It was winter he wore a fabulous cloak. I suppose you've told me a dozen times who his son is, but you'll have to repeat it.'

Sometimes when presented with the increasing acuity of Ilse's recollection of the past Hiroko wondered if her own memory would undergo a slow dissolve, executed with perfect linearity, so that she would recede backwards through her life until there was nothing after the bomb in her remembrances nothing of survival except the evidence of her body, so incredibly intact other than the charred tattoos between her shoulders and waist.

She made a quick gesture of impatience with her fingers.

'He's the one in the Army.'

'Oh yes. Indian Army?'

'Pakistan Army, Ilse. Sikandar's the one who stayed in India, not Iqbal.'

'Well, I'm just glad you're here, not there.'

Hiroko didn't answer. Today she felt acutely her initial unease about living in this luxurious apartment if you were this high up, you should be in the hills. Abbottabad, that hill station with its echoes of Mussoorie, had become home in the years after Sajjad's death. Within a year of his funeral she had sold the house, taken early retirement from the school, and accepted the offer from her old friend Rehana who had lived in Tokyo and Karachi before widowhood returned her to her childhood home to come and live with her in the hills of Abbottabad, away from the chaos of a city which was so emptied of joy without Sajjad and Raza that to live in it was to live in regret.

In Abbottabad, she had discovered she was a woman of hills and greenery, a woman content to walk for hours through stretches of silent valleys, with only a German shepherd she called him Kyubi for company and protection. But then India tested its nuclear bomb, and around her almost everyone said Pakistan must do the same, there was no real option (the only voices of exception came from a retired general who lived down the road from her, the journalist who always asked her to edit his columns, and the woman who came twice a week to cook and clean who said non-violence was the only solution). So she picked up the phone to call Ilse Weiss in New York, and said she was going to stay with Raza, now in Miami, and perhaps she'd stop in New York along the way. Somehow that stop had extended into three years, through a combination of Ilse's insistence and Raza's lack thereof.

'Raza did email yesterday,' Hiroko said abruptly. 'Not to say where he was. Just to cancel his visit. It doesn't fit his schedule.' She caught and held Kim's look of sympathy. They both knew what it was to be an easily erased entry in the cluttered schedule of a beloved relative. Though how it had happened with her and her boy she still didn't know. Somewhere she had failed, terribly.

'What a pity,' Ilse said unconvincingly.

'I've told you before. You don't have to pretend. I know you don't like my son any more than you liked his father.'

'Oh, I'm sure I was a little in love with Sajjad. Don't you think? He was terribly good-looking, and I was always quite shallow about that sort of thing.'

Hiroko, laughing, clasped Ilse's hand in hers.

'I'm so glad you're my friend, Ilse Weiss.'

I really, really wish I were old, Kim thought, watching the two of them.

28.

'Kon! Kon-man! Hey, Razor!'

Raza Konrad swivelled sharply in the direction of the voice, prepared for a challenge. But all he saw was a smiling young American tanning on a beach towel, his body an a.s.sortment of puffed-up muscles bisected by black shorts so tiny they could have been inked in by an underzealous censor. The American could hardly have presented a sharper contrast to Raza with his slight frame concealing its wiriness beneath b.u.t.ton-down shirt and trousers, and his guarded expression.

'Throw me a can of beer from the icebox,' the man said, running the flat of his palm over his close-cropped hair, and wiping the sweat on the edge of the towel. 'And have one yourself.'

Raza paused a moment to test the sentence for insults was it merely a friendly offer, or did it presume that Raza needed permission from this boy to take what he wanted from the icebox? The tanning man continued to smile; Raza shrugged and reached into the icebox, which was only a few steps away from him. The chill against his fingers was welcoming, and he plucked out a nugget of ice, sliding it along his throat and face. By the time he was close enough to the tanning man to toss the can of beer at him the ice had melted.

'This time next year this place will be a five-star resort,' the man said, gesturing expansively around the mud compound with its high walls and gun towers. He tapped the side of his head. 'I've got a plan. You want in?'

Raza shook his head and continued to walk in the direction of the armoured juggernaut which he wasn't supposed to take out of the compound without clearance. Well, there was no one here for him to get clearance from everyone out hunting down terror, other than the tanning boy, whose sprained ankle was keeping him away from active duty, and the cooks, cleaners and other a.s.sortment of Third Country Nationals (a group from which Raza had always been exempted by virtue of payscale rather than pa.s.sport). He would have preferred the jeep open-aired and therefore less of a challenge to men with guns but he didn't want to commandeer the only vehicle available to the TCNs. Though around here he didn't know where they might want to drive to. Perhaps 'away' was destination enough, he considered, as he drove the Humvee out with a roar into the dusty plains of Afghanistan.

That was how he had felt what was it? Nearly nineteen years ago after his father died. Simply to be out of the s.p.a.ces which Sajjad Ali Ashraf had filled with his laughter and his embraces. So when his cousin Hussein Iqbal's eldest son called from Dubai to condole over Sajjad's death and mentioned that should Raza need a job there was an opening at the hotel in which he worked there was no hesitation in Raza as he said yes.

Hiroko had been furious. University, she told her son. You will go to university as your father wanted.

I have to provide for us now, Raza said, trying to play the part of the son who puts aside his own desires for the sake of his responsibilities as head of the family.

Hiroko wasn't fooled, but she saw that it wasn't just the memory of his father that he wanted to escape but also the presence of her own grief, which sharpened his guilt with its every expression. That made it impossible for her to demand that he stay.

Was that the moment he walked in one direction and his conscience in another, Raza wondered, or was it earlier when he urged a boy towards a training camp filled with militants?

He lowered the tinted-gla.s.s windows of the Humvee though this was expressly against company rules and ejected the rap CD from the player, replacing it with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Sometimes the walls shake, sometimes the doors tremble . . . Sometimes the walls shake, sometimes the doors tremble . . . Raza looked out at the landscape speeding past in which it was impossible to separate rock from rubble. Something metal glinted at him from the rubble and he imagined a watch, still keeping time on a wrist without a pulse. Raza looked out at the landscape speeding past in which it was impossible to separate rock from rubble. Something metal glinted at him from the rubble and he imagined a watch, still keeping time on a wrist without a pulse.

In his decade in Dubai, prior to Harry re-entering his life, he sought out as many nationalities as possible, acquiring language with the zeal of a collector Bengali and Tamil from the hotel staff; Arabic from the receptionists; Swahili from the in-house jazz band; French from Claudia the most consistent of his many lovers; Farsi from the couple who ran the restaurant at the corner of his street; Russian from the two hookers who lived in the apartment next door to his studio and knew they could use their spare key to slip into his bed after their clients had left, seeking comfort or laughter or platonic embraces; and beyond this, a smattering of words from all over the globe. The more languages you learned, he discovered, the more you found overlap: 'Qahweh' in Arabic, 'gehve' in Farsi, 'cafe' in French, 'coffee' in English, 'kohi' in j.a.panese . . .

But he stayed away from the Afghans. To take even a word from them seemed an act of theft.

He raised the window and everything became mercifully unreal. No brilliant blueness of the sky forcing him to recall Abdullah who said the winter sky over Afghanistan was different from anything 'those Karachiwallas' could believe possible.

Hours later, Raza jumped down from his Humvee, blinking away the darkness of the tinted-gla.s.s enclosure. He was in a broad pa.s.s through the great mud-and-pebble mountains which had once stirred mythic creatures in his imagination. But instead of gunfire echoing through the silence there was the noise of commerce instead. Tea shacks and taxis, donkey carts piled high with wares of one kind or another, boys selling bottles of mineral water and cheap plastic sungla.s.ses. Raza watched a van unload a group of men who walked forward about twenty feet, got into another van and drove off. Somewhere in that twenty-foot expanse Afghanistan became Pakistan. The Pakistani soldiers on the far side of the expanse didn't seem particularly interested in checking the papers of any of the Pathans who went back and forth, but as Raza approached one of them put up a hand, palm pressed almost against Raza's face.

'So you let Afghans into Pakistan without any trouble, but you stop a Pakistani who's coming home,' Raza said in Urdu. 'Strange world this has become. Go, tell Captain Ashraf his brother's here.'

He walked back to the Afghan side and sipped a cup of tea as he sat on his haunches with the other men, feeling slightly foolish for being the only man out of uniform who was wearing trousers rather than a shalwar. Within a few minutes he saw Captain Sajjad Ashraf approach he was the youngest by far of Iqbal's sons, and as Raza watched him strut forward, beating the air around him with a stick, he wondered if Hussein in Dubai really thought it was worth it: all those years of working in hotel kitchens so that this Sajjad could be given the education his brothers never had, and with it prospects they could only dream about in all the years their father was whoring and gambling away all the family money.

Raza stepped forward to meet his cousin, but when Sajjad stopped he did too. Raza was the elder by almost a decade he should be the one who was approached.

His cousin smiled across the distance between them.

'If I come towards you the Pakistan Army will have invaded Afghanistan.'

Raza rolled his eyes, and walked forward.

'Welcome home,' Sajjad said, embracing him perfunctorily. 'You look well. The American military must be looking after you.'

'I'm not with . . .' He stopped, and shrugged away the rest of the sentence. The line between working for the American military and working for a private military company contracted to the American military was so fine he knew he would only look foolish for trying to delineate it. 'How are things with you? How's Hussein? Everyone else?'

'Fine, everyone's fine. Hussein and Altamash have expanded their business they're opening a third supermarket next month.'

Raza smiled at that. His life in Dubai had grown very separate to that of Hussein and their other cousin Altamash from Delhi, as his language skills and unPakistani looks had moved him swiftly from the kitchens where his cousins worked (so much for all Hussein's letters about his high-flying life among the sand dunes) on a path upward to the 'gold-star reception desk' at a five-star hotel, but any guilt he felt about that separateness was put to rest the day he gave his cousins the initial down payment for their first tiny store with his sign-on bonus from Arkwright and Glenn.

'I've just sent my wife and children to Dubai to stay with them,' Sajjad continued. 'Safest option with the way things are now. b.a.s.t.a.r.d Indians.' He swiped the air with his stick. 'They never miss an opportunity. Well, let them try to take us on.'

'What'll happen when they try,' Raza mocked. 'You going to scare them away with your big stick?'

Sajjad scowled his face instantly transforming into that of the youngest member of a family who spends his life bullied and teased by those older than him. 'We've got better weapons than sticks, Raza bhai.'

'The nuclear option?' Raza said steadily. 'My mother has been worrying about that. I told her no one's that crazy.'

Sajjad looked thoughtful.

'Here is our problem. India is so big. How can we ever destroy their missile launchers, the nuclear installations in the south, in the east? Our planes would be shot down before they got that far, our missiles can't travel that distance. India, on the other hand, can take out our launchers, no problem. And then we're left with nuclear weapons and no way to deliver them.'

Deliver. It sounded so polite.

'So where does that leave us?'

'With only one option. The instant the war starts, before the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds have time to take out our launchers, we must launch our missiles. Our biggest missiles. Right into the mouth of their government in Dilli. Cause such havoc that they turn around and run, and never ever think of even looking us in the eye again.'

'Dilli?'

'Yes. Dilli.'

The earth shook beneath Raza's feet and for a moment he believed Sajjad Ali Ashraf would rise out of it and pull the man who shared his name down into the grave with him but it was only the rumbling of a van making its way along the mountain pa.s.s. Suddenly able to see the absurdity of it all, Raza started to laugh.

'And you're sharing this cla.s.sified strategic information with a man who works with the United States military.'

'You're my cousin,' said Sajjad, looking wounded. 'What? What are you smiling at?'

'This strategy of yours. Ours. We're crazier than you are. We could push that b.u.t.ton at the slightest provocation so don't even slightly provoke us.' He switched to English. 'Not MAD, but madder. Are you hoping I'll pa.s.s this on to the Indians via the Pentagon?'

'I don't know what you're talking about,' Sajjad said. 'And if you take this att.i.tude I won't give you the information you want. It wasn't easy to get it, you know.'

Raza put out a hand, caught his cousin by the elbow.

'Sorry. Please tell me. What did you discover?'

The name and telephone number of a man in Kabul; that was all Sajjad had for him. In 1983, this man had been the Commander at the camp where Raza had spent that terrible afternoon.

'I was only able to find out which camp it was because the ISI have a record of Raza Ashraf from Karachi who the Americans sent to that camp,' Sajjad said, grudging in his admiration for the wild adventure of Raza's youth.

'Does the ISI have a record of whether anyone in the camp was told anything about me? My name, what the ISI believed I was doing there?'

Sajjad shook his head.