Burnt Shadows Part 21

'Who?'

'Abdullah. The boy I went to the camps with in '83. My cousin got me in touch with his old commander.'

Harry frowned, and shook his head.

'Why are you . . . Whose side is his old commander on now?'

'Could you please stop being an employee of A and G for a minute. I don't know which side he's on. I didn't ask. But I didn't tell him what I'm doing either. He thinks I'm with a relief organisation based in the Gulf.'

'Hold on, Raza. Hold on. You really think it's smart to call Afghans whose allegiance you know nothing about and announce you're in the country?'

'It's a big country and I didn't say which part of it I'm in.' It had occurred to him that the Commander might remember him as the boy who worked with the CIA, but when he spoke to the man he discovered he was remembered quite differently: You're the fainting Hazara who fooled a Pashtun boy into thinking you were important to the CIA just because a man who looked American held out a pair of shoes to you You're the fainting Hazara who fooled a Pashtun boy into thinking you were important to the CIA just because a man who looked American held out a pair of shoes to you.

'What else did he say?' Harry asked.

Raza looked up towards the sky, while his fingers traced constellations in the sand.

'That the last he heard of Abdullah he was at a camp in Afghanistan which the Russians decimated.'

Harry tried to put aside his feelings of hurt that Raza had sought out this boy without telling him he was doing so.

'I'm sorry. I know you once considered him a friend. But that was a long time ago.'

'After my father died, I went to my mother and begged her forgiveness. She said it wasn't my fault. I could not have known anything like that would happen, there was no part of me that was responsible. And then she said but if you know of any way to get that boy Abdullah out of the camps, you must do it. What happens to him there, that is your responsibility. You made him go when you could have told him not to.'

'You're not the reason he became a mujahideen,' Harry said.

'Yes, I am. If it hadn't been for me he would have been driving a truck instead of standing in the path of Russian bombs. And, whatever my mother might have said to the contrary, my father would still be alive.' In the sand he connected the stars of Orion belt, bow, knees.

Harry leaned his weight slightly against Raza. He wished more than anything that he had not been the one to tell Raza that Sajjad had gone to the docks looking for him. He would have been willing to live with the blame Raza had cast at him the day they stood over Sajjad's body if that had spared the younger man but years ago Raza had decided the responsibility for his father's death was his alone.

'Abdullah's brothers were all mujahideen he grew up knowing it was his next step the way you knew tenth grade follows ninth grade.'

'Yes, yes.' Raza's voice was tough with anger. 'I convinced myself of that, too. And I did nothing for Abdullah. I didn't even stop to think if there was anything I could do for him. Twenty years, I've hardly even thought of him.'

'And you were right to put it out of your mind. G.o.d knows I adore your mother, but she doesn't know the realities of war.' As soon as the words were out, he stopped, red with shame at what he'd said.

'When you don't know the realities of war, that's when you can put things like this out of your head. But coming here, being in this place, seeing all the young men who have been old men almost their entire lives, it does something to you. It must do something to you, Harry. Don't you feel any responsibility at all?'

'Sometimes I listen to these liberals in America and marvel at their ability to trace back all the world's ills to something America did, or something America didn't do. You've got the disease on a personal rather than a national level. You're not responsible for Abdullah. And as for your father-'

'As for my father, he would have wept to know the kind of men you and I have become.' Raza swept the palm of his hand across the ground and buried the Hunter. 'How long ago was it that you decided to justify your life by transforming responsibility into a disease?' He stood up gracefully, the blanket a cast-off chrysalis, and walked away in the direction of the radio broadcasting music from a Pakistani channel.

Good, Harry thought, picking up the blanket and trudging inside. Feeling superior to Harry was Raza's way of quietening his own conscience. Now he'd stop staring at handprints and searching out a past he'd ignored for twenty years, and get his head back in the game.

32.

When Hiroko Ashraf had arrived in New York three summers ago, the immigration official a man with a peace sign tattooed on his forearm looked quizzically from her face to her Pakistani pa.s.sport, then heaved a great sigh as he opened the pa.s.sport and saw her place of birth scrawled beneath her husband's name.

'It's OK,' he said, stamping her pa.s.sport without asking a single question. 'You'll be safe here.'

What surprised her even more than his hand reaching out to squeeze hers was his obliviousness to irony. She did not share it. A week after India's nuclear tests, with Pakistan's response in kind looming, she didn't see the ache in her back as a result of the long plane ride but rather a sign of her birds' displeasure that she should have chosen this, of all countries, as her place of refuge from a nuclear world.

When she stood in line at the taxi rank, aware that everything was familiar from the movies except the tactile quality of the early-summer air and the run-down look of everything from terminal to taxis to travellers, it occurred to her that Pakistan might have tested its bomb while she was flying from continent to continent. So when the cab drew up and a young man who could have been either Indian or Pakistani got out of the driver's seat to help her load her luggage, she blurted out instantly, in Urdu, 'Has Pakistan tested yet?'

The man drew back in surprise, and then started laughing.

'You speak Urdu!' he said. 'No, no. We haven't tested yet. Not yet. How do you know Urdu?'

'I've lived in Pakistan since '47,' she replied, feeling strangely flirtatious. 'I am Pakistani.'

'Amazing!' He held the door open for her. 'You're Pakistani, and I'm American. Became a citizen just last week.' He switched to English to say, 'Welcome to my country, aunty.'

His name was Omar. He was from Gujranwala, but he'd once been to visit distant relatives in Karachi, in n.a.z.imabad.

'It's a good thing you didn't arrive yesterday,' he told Hiroko as they drove past boys playing cricket near a large silver globe a sight enormously cheering to Hiroko. 'Major cab strike. 98 per cent of yellow-cab drivers took part. 98 per cent!'

She smiled at his tone of voice she had heard it from many of her former students in 1988 when boys who had once sat at the back of the cla.s.s were out on the streets, waving the flags of their political party and singing songs of victory. The details of the cab strike remained slightly mysterious to her but through her jet lag, and attempts to keep up with Omar's rapid-fire delivery, one thing struck her.

'Many of the cab drivers are Indian, aren't they?' Omar nodded at her in the rear-view mirror. 'And many are Pakistani?'

'No, no, please,' Omar said. 'Don't ask how it's possible that we can strike together when our countries are in the middle of planning for the Day of Judgement. It's what all the journalists ask. Aunty, we are taxi drivers, and we're protesting unjust new rules. Why should we let those governments who long ago let us down stop us from successfully doing that?'

Hiroko opened the window and let in the New York air, laughing as if she were part of a victory when a turbanned cabbie drew up alongside and reached out to clasp Omar's hand.

Omar of Gujranwala was the first New Yorker whose number she wrote down in her address book. 'I work the day shift,' he said. 'Any time you know in advance that you need a cab between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., just call me.' And his smiling 'Welcome to my country, aunty' marked the start of her love affair with New York.

A city in which she could hear Urdu, English, j.a.panese, German all in the s.p.a.ce of a few minutes. The miracle of it! Sometimes she rode the subways, overheard conversations her only destination. It was the young j.a.panese women who intrigued her most of all their unabashed laughter, their vocabulary peppered with words she didn't understand, forcing her to recognise that her own j.a.panese belonged to 'Grandmother's generation'. Nothing foreign about foreignness in this city. 'Like Mary Poppins' handbag', Ilse had said to explain how much the little island of Manhattan could hold within it. She felt she had been waiting all her life to arrive here.

And when the buildings fell, she found herself caught up in a feeling of solidarity quite unfamiliar, utterly overwhelming. She stood beside Kim who had driven across from Seattle in the early-morning hours, handing out food to emergency workers; later, she demanded to be allowed to give blood what did it matter if she was old? She didn't need so much blood and retreated only when told firmly she was from a malarial country, her blood was unacceptable regardless of age. She didn't take that personally was touched to be given a badge announcing she'd donated blood, 'because intention matters', the exhausted Red Cross woman had told her. When Hiroko said the Prophet Mohammad made exactly that point surprising herself by the need to say such a thing the woman smiled and said, 'I'm sure he did.'

But then, things shifted. The island seemed tiny, people's views shrunken. How could a place so filled with immigrants take the idea of 'patriotism' so seriously? Ilse had laughed and said, 'The zeal of the convert.' And that phrase spoken by a smiling young man in Tokyo kept returning to her: 'American lives.' It was a talisman, that phrase, the second part of it given weight by the first part.

All this she had thought and uncomfortably felt for weeks, but today, finally, mid-January in New York, the world felt different as Hiroko sat with a cup of jasmine tea and the morning crossword at a West Village bistro in that rare s.p.a.ce of time between the breakfast and lunch crowd when lingering at a table didn't feel uncivic. She looked up as the bistro's only other customer opened the door to depart; cold air and voices rushed in a man irritable on his cell phone, a dog's bark, a truck trundling past on the cobblestones then the door closed and she was once more sealed into the silence disrupted only by the waitress tapping her pencil on a counter top.

It would be overstating things to say this felt like peace; but at least it felt like s.p.a.ce in which to exhale. For the first time in over a month there seemed a movement away from, rather than towards, nuclear war and Hiroko felt a swoop of affection towards everything in the world from New York and its inhabitants to a dictator half a world away. Not that she'd ever had faith in leaders not in Pakistan any more than in j.a.pan. She remembered lying on her stomach on the floor of a Nagasaki hospital, watching a young boy use a pair of chopsticks to lift maggots out of the pulsating redness that was his mother's breast he was the only one not riveted by the sound of the Emperor's voice, heard by his public for the first time, announcing j.a.pan's surrender on the radio. Despite all the iconoclasm she'd learnt from her father, she was dismayed by how high-pitched and feeble the Emperor's voice was. She felt betrayed by that voice more than by anything it said.

'Seven across?' The waitress held up her copy of the crossword.

' "QWEET" isn't a word, is it?'

'Honey, it should be.' The waitress pointed to the door. 'I'm stepping out for a smoke. You'll be OK in here.' It was an a.s.sertion rather than a question.

Once more, there was the open door, the rush of winter and sound and again, silence.

Hiroko took her cell phone out of her handbag. She knew who she had to call to celebrate this step back from the nuclear brink. For a moment she wondered if she should get home first and make a cheap call using the landline largely she retained her frugal habits despite the vast sums of money Raza kept depositing into her account but then a feeling of wild glee ran through her, and she punched the necessary b.u.t.tons.

At first she didn't recognise Yoshi Watanabe's voice. He sounded nothing like the man who had arrived in Pakistan three years ago with a group of hibakusha, determined to say what he could to turn Pakistan away from the idea of nuclear tests. Hiroko had translated the words of the hibakusha into Urdu through the press conference, spent an afternoon filled with tears and laughter with Yoshi afterwards, and then boarded the plane to New York.

'It is me,' he said. 'My voice . . . that's the cancer you're hearing.'

'Yoshi-san!'

'It's everywhere. There's nothing anyone can do.'

She was surprised by the tears burning her eyes. In Nagasaki he had only been someone she knew very vaguely, Konrad's friend who betrayed Konrad. And then she became, to him, atonement. Following that, through all the years of letters exchanged, he was her one remaining link to Nagasaki.

'You're calling to celebrate, I suppose,' he said, his voice slightly peevish. 'About that mad country of yours. It will survive incineration, it seems.'

'You don't think this is cause for celebration?'

He lowered his voice.

'Hear my confession, Hiroko-san. I was diagnosed a month ago, and in my brain there was a mad logic which said if there is nuclear war in the sub-continent then I'll survive. Them or me. Them or me. And every day these last weeks I've turned on the television wanting so much to see mushroom clouds in the news.' Her exclamation of horror only made him raise his voice. 'Between the dead cells mushrooming inside my body and those out there, annihilating a section of the world, there is no choice. There is not even a question of a choice.'

There was the sound of a small struggle, and a woman came on to the phone.

'The cancer has reached his brain,' she said. 'He doesn't mean any of this.'

In the background, Yoshi was shouting, 'I mean every word!

Hiroko ended the call, hands shaking. Throwing money down on the table, she left the bistro in a hurry. The wind cut through her. She had forgotten her hat and gloves inside. Never mind. She couldn't go back to that funerary atmosphere.

She walked, half blind with tears, towards the West Side Highway unable to keep herself from imagining the congestion of Karachi manifest in a post-bomb landscape by shadows overlying shadows overlying shadows. She needed to stand at the edge of the island and look towards the water. She needed room to breathe. Sajjad Sajjad, she kept repeating, trying to invoke something of his presence, his ability to make her feel everything could be borne. His optimism.

When the phone rang, she almost didn't answer it, but it was Kim, so she did. Within ten minutes of hearing the tone of her voice, Kim was slamming a cab door behind her, hurrying towards Hiroko the lone figure at the edge of a pier, white hair whipping around her face. Her bare hands were resting on the railing and Kim said nothing until she had peeled her own gloves off her hands and eased Hiroko's stiff fingers into them.

Then she said, 'No one should get pneumonia looking at New Jersey,' as she wrapped her scarf around Hiroko's head.

'I want the world to stop being such a terrible place,' Hiroko said.

Kim didn't know what to say in response. She was feeling so weighed down by it herself the terribleness of the world. Every morning she'd read the newspaper, word leaking through of casualties in Afghanistan, and think of Harry. Then to work always before a place of refuge for her. The psychology of structural engineers! She often used to laugh about it with her friends at university. We antic.i.p.ate disasters, calculate stress with mathematical precision. The messier our personal lives the better we are at designing structures that withstand the pressure they'll inevitably or potentially endure. Bring on your storms, bring on your earthquakes. We've done our calculations. And lovers, take note here the joke which was not a joke reached its climax when we break up with you it's because we've modelled the situation, run the simulations, we know which way things are headed.

But now even work was smeared by what was happening in the world. Earthquakes and floods were one thing but to start having to calculate the effect of a bomb or an aeroplane, that was something else entirely. What size of plane? What weight of a bomb? If a man walked into a lobby with dynamite strapped to his chest? If chemical gas was released into the ventilation system?

'It is not part of my job to imagine this!' she had shouted yesterday at the architect she was working with.

'The world won't get more or less terrible if we're indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate,' Kim said. 'Though it's possible it will seem slightly less terrible if there are marshmallows in the hot chocolate.'

'I'll go indoors soon,' Hiroko said, patting her hand. 'I'm sorry I didn't know you were going to run out of work to come here. I feel quite foolish now.'

'Tell me what you're thinking,' Kim said, burrowing her hands into the pockets of her winter coat.

'Fairy tales,' Hiroko replied, watching the river rush past. A few degrees colder and it would freeze. Were there lovers or artists standing by ready to paint a beloved's name under the ice? Hana. Her lost daughter. She glanced sideways at the woman standing next to her. 'When Raza was young I didn't want him to know what I had lived through but I wanted him to understand the awfulness of it. Does that make sense? So I invented all these stories, terrible stories. Too terrible to tell my son, in the end. I keep thinking of them these days.'

Kim nodded.

'My father told me about them once. You don't mind, do you?'

'No. I wish now I'd told Raza. Told everyone. Written it down and put a copy in every school, every library, every public meeting place.' She frowned, as though trying to unpick some minor knot of confusion. 'But you see, then I'd read the history books. Truman, Churchill, Stalin, the Emperor. My stories seemed so small, so tiny a fragment in the big picture. Even Nagasaki seventy-five thousand dead; it's just a fraction of the seventy-two million who died in the war. A tiny fraction. Just over .001 per cent. Why all this fuss about .001 per cent?'

'You lived it,' Kim said. 'Your father died in it. Your fiance died in it. There's no shame in putting all the weight in the world on that.'

It was the wrong answer.

Hiroko turned to her, face bright with anger.

'Is that why? That's why Nagasaki was such a monstrous crime? Because it happened to me?' She pulled the gloves off and threw them at Kim. 'I don't want your hot chocolate,' she said and stalked away.

Kim picked a glove off the ground and slapped herself with it. Hard.

33.

'Raza Hazara?'

Raza spun away from the group of Afghan men whose words he'd been translating, satellite phone pressed to his ear.

'Raza Hazara?' the voice on the other end said again.

Steve snapped his fingers in Raza's direction.

'I said, tell whoever it is you'll call back.'

'Who is this?' Raza said in Pashto.

'Are you Raza Hazara?'

'Yes, yes. Who is this?'

Steve caught Raza by the arm.

'You're on company time here.' He gestured towards the delegation of Afghan men who had come to pledge allegiance to the Americans. 'Now tell them I'll need some proof of their loyalty.'

'Do any of you speak Urdu?' Harry cut in. One of the men raised his hand quickly as if he were a student trying to curry favour. 'Finish your call, Raza. I've got this.'

'Make sure you get a percentage of his pay cheque,' Steve grumbled.