Burnt Shadows Part 23

The tunnel was narrow and musty, its roof too low for upright walking. Raza thought of Harry in here just weeks earlier, hunched over with his body angled sideways to ease his progress. 'I feel like Alice in Wonderland stuck in that house,' he'd groaned and Raza, slight enough to walk through with minimal discomfort, had laughed and said that if ever they really needed to use this tunnel as an escape route he'd go first because there was every likelihood that Harry would get stuck. 'What then? You'd leave me?' Harry said, turning to smile at Raza and tripping on a stone here, here, the torch-light shining on the tunnel wall showed Raza the smear of dried blood from Harry's temple. Raza wiped tears off his face and pressed them against Harry's blood. Then, awkwardly it required him to crane his neck uncomfortably he pressed his mouth against the moist blood. But it still didn't seem quite real to him.

It was almost an hour later that he finally emerged on the other side of the tunnel into a roofless structure which smelt faintly of livestock, no sign of habitation around. The scent came from the dun-coloured tarpaulin which Harry had found in a barn filled with goat droppings. Beneath it was a jeep.

Raza pulled off the tarpaulin, unlocked the jeep with the key from Harry's bedside, and drove out of the derelict barn. Through the darkness he made out the faint outlines of mountains the border, and Pakistan. He stopped the jeep, consulted his GPS. Pakistan was the obvious destination. Obvious to him, and to Steve. He might just be able to convince the Army guards at the border to phone Captain Sajjad Ashraf and receive a.s.surances that Raza was just another Pakistani who the Americans had turned against after extracting all that was useful from him, but the bigger problem was the bounty hunters who prowled the border area, on the lookout for 'enemy combatants'.

Raza stepped out of the jeep and unb.u.t.toned the soft top. The stars glittered malevolently. One phone call from Steve perhaps that call had already been made and he would enter data banks the world over as a suspected terrorist. His bank accounts frozen. His mother's phone tapped. His emails and phone logs, his Internet traffic, his credit-card receipts: no longer the markers of his daily life allowing him to wind a path back through a thicket of lovers to the specificity of the 3.13 a.m. call with Margo, the poem forwarded to Aliya, the box of Miami sand couriered to Natalie, but a different kind of evidence entirely. That nothing in the world could possibly show him to be Harry Burton's murderer seemed barely to matter in the face of all that could be done to his life before that conclusion. If anyone even bothered with a conclusion. He had never felt so sharply the powerlessness of being merely Pakistani.

Perhaps he should go back, back through the tunnel to Steve. Back where he could explain about the cricket ball and Abdullah's brother, and the Commander and Kim Burton could verify he had called her to discuss Abdullah. And what would that prove? Only that he wanted to help a man he hadn't seen in twenty years who ran from the FBI. If Steve was looking for confirmation that Raza's allegiance belonged to some brotherhood of jihadis he would find it right there, right from Kim Burton's mouth. He leaned his head against the doorframe with a small pathetic cry.

No, there could be no going back not to the compound, not to his life. He unzipped the knapsack, tossed out his pa.s.sport and green card and watched the wind sift fine particles of sand on to the doc.u.ments that made him legal. For an instant longer he breathed in deeply the desert air, everything around him vast and indifferent, and felt the terror of unbecoming.

Then he returned to the jeep, and plotted his course on the GPS navigation system.

35.

In New York taxi cabs Hiroko always made sure she sat behind the pa.s.senger-side seat so the cabbies could turn to look at her as she talked to them about their lives discussing everything from the disconnection between their families back home and their all-male New York world to every component that went into strike action: leasing and medallions, the TLC and the TWA, the brokers and the garage-owners. Through these conversations she began to understand a great many things about this varied group of migrant workers, including their network of communication via CB radios, cell-phone networks, holding-lot conversations, driver-welfare organisations, the Taxi Workers' Alliance.

It was the effectiveness of this network of communication and Omar from Gujranwala's willingness to put it in motion on her behalf which had her walking into the reading room of the New York Public Library four days after Harry Burton died.

As she entered the cavernous reading room made cosy by its many desk lamps, Hiroko found the teacher in her beaming at the sight of all those heads bent over books, some thrum of energy and the turning of pages slipping the room out of the grasp of silence into the comfort of quiet. She walked down the aisle between desks, the chandeliers reflecting their light off the floor, turning it into a bronze river.

Halfway down the room, a broad-shouldered, dark-haired man wearing a thick green sweater was sitting straight-backed in his chair, his fingers resting very lightly on the page of a book. The electric-blue tape which held together the frame of his gla.s.ses identified him as the man Hiroko had come to meet.

She sat down in the empty seat beside him. The expectancy of his glance towards her quickly shifted into discomfort, and he stood up, taking the book with him, and moved down to another chair which had empty seats on either side of it.

The old man with crumpled features sitting opposite Hiroko raised his eyebrows at her.

'Afghan. They don't like women,' he said.

Hiroko smiled politely and made her way down the table to one of the empty seats beside the Afghan man with the hazel eyes and the chin several shades lighter than the rest of his face. He ignored her, and carried on looking down at the photograph of lush orchards against a backdrop of mountains in his oversized book.

'Abdullah. I'm Raza's mother.'

His instant reaction was to push his chair back from the table with a loud sc.r.a.ping sound his expression one of disbelief. She put her hand on his arm, and he paused, seeing Raza in her features.

'Raza's not Hazara. I'm j.a.panese. And his father was Pakistani. Originally from Delhi. He and I moved to Karachi in '47.'

Her accent Karachi mingled with something else countered the improbability of what she was saying. Also, Abdullah had heard what the other man said about Afghans and women and now he saw the hand resting on his arm as a refusal to accept that a.n.a.lysis.

He moved his chair forward once more.

'But Raza's in Afghanistan.'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

She shook her head, made a gesture which didn't only imply a lack of understanding but also failure. It had never occurred to her that her son would enter wars.

When Abdullah continued to look at her with a suspicion that obviously wanted itself overturned she pointed at the double-paged photograph he had been looking at.

'Beautiful,' she said.

'Kandahar. Before the wars.' He ran his palm across the photograph, as though he could feel the texture of the ripening pom egranates pushing up against his skin. 'First they cut down the trees. Then they put landmines everywhere. Now-' He bunched his fingers together and then sprang them apart. 'Cl.u.s.ter bombs.'

He turned the page to a picture of a very old couple, the woman vibrant in multicoloured clothes, the man resting his hand on her shoulder as they walked across sand dunes as if he knew his drabness would become part of the desert floor if he didn't stay moored to the woman's column of brightness. The sky was impossibly blue.

'Light,' Abdullah said. 'The light in Afghanistan. Like nowhere else.'

Hiroko nodded, touching the page as reverently as Abdullah had. It was difficult to find photographs of Nagasaki that preceded the bomb, but Kim had presented her with what remained in the Burton family of George Burton's old pictures Azalea Manor, the bund, Megane-Bashi when the river was high and when she looked at them she was surprised by how strong a grip childhood had on her ageing mind.

Abdullah continued to turn the pages of the book, stopping briefly on some pictures, lingering over others. Occasionally he'd point out a detail to Hiroko a goat rearing on its hind legs in the corner of one photograph with the poise of a dancer, a kite flying high above a dome painted an identical green which made the kite appear an escaping roof tile. Sometimes he'd point to an object and identify it in Pashto she'd repeat the word, pleased when she found any overlap with Urdu and delighted when she found resemblance to the Hindko words she had learnt while in Abbottabad.

When they came to the end of the book, Abdullah closed it and said, 'That's where I want to live.'

'Afghanistan?'

'Afghanistan then.'

He said very little beyond that until he and Hiroko exited the library into the dull light of late afternoon. The cold had nothing of the savageness of which it was capable at this time of year, but even so Abdullah pulled a wool hat low over his eyes and wrapped a broad scarf around his neck.

'He was not even an Afghan and he came to fight with us. Not a Pashtun, and he knew our language. And I had him sent away.' Hiroko didn't know who he was talking about. 'But instead of hating me, he still tries to help me.'

Understanding, Hiroko turned her face away, wishing she had raised a son who could fit such a glorified image. She didn't know whether or not to tell Abdullah the truth her son was a mercenary, all he had done to help Abdullah was make one phone call to a woman he'd never met to try and pa.s.s all responsibility on to her, and despite his promises to the contrary he hadn't returned for Harry's funeral and hadn't even bothered to explain why. That final failure was the one which most convinced her that her relationship with her son was entirely comprised of lies she still felt betrayed as she recalled her final conversation with him, just hours after Harry's death, when he said in a tone of voice she believed completely, 'Ma, I have to come to bury him. I have to see you. I have to see you.' But when Kim called his satphone to find out when he was flying in, and if he'd agree to read something at the funeral, a man called Steve had answered the phone and said Raza wouldn't be coming back to New York for the funeral, or at any time in the near future; for security reasons, he couldn't say anything more.

Kim had ended the call, shaking her head.

'Dad really moulded Raza in his image, didn't he?' When Hiroko tried to protest, there must be some other explanation, Raza had insisted he'd come for the funeral, Kim sat Hiroko down in front of the computer and explained to her, with the aid of the Internet, the real business of A and G. While Hiroko was still struggling to overlay the world of private military contractors on to her image of her son's life, Kim added, as if it were a matter of little consequence, 'And on top of all that, he wanted me to smuggle some Afghan across the border.'

'When I asked my brother to see if Raza his name is really Raza? knew someone who could get me across the border I didn't mean he should tell his mother,' Abdullah said, patting a stone lion's paw with the familiarity of ritual as he walked down the library steps. 'I don't want to get you into any trouble.'

'You won't,' Hiroko said, longing to be back in the sanctuary of books. She spent so much of her life in and around the Village that the regimented yet frenzied intersections of midtown made her feel as though she were stuck in a deranged crossword grid. 'Do you know if your brother has spoken to Raza since-' She almost said 'since Harry died'. 'Again, I mean. Has he spoken to him again?'

'I don't know. I will call him in three days.' Almost apologetically he added, 'He doesn't have a phone. Once a week he goes to the call office.' He took a cell phone out of his pocket and looked wistfully at it. 'So many things you promise yourself you won't get used to, and then you do.'

'How long have you been in New York?' She had come here not knowing what kind of man she would find, certain only that she had to see this mysterious piece of her son's life. But now she couldn't see the boy who drew Raza into a life of violence but only a man who understood lost homelands and the impossibility of return. He had looked at the photographs of Kandahar's orchards as Sajjad used to look at pictures of his old moholla in Dilli.

'I was with the mujahideen until the Soviets left. But then, peace never happened. And Afghan fighting Afghan, Pashtun against Hazara . . . no. So I went back to Karachi. Yes, for four years.' He switched to Urdu. 'I was a truck driver. Every time I went to the fish harbour I'd have one eye watching for Raza Hazara. But my brothers said one of us had to go to America where you can earn a real living. I was the youngest, the most fit I had the best chance of making the journey across. And I was just married, so there was only a wife to leave behind and no children.'

'You have a wife?'

'Yes,' he said, taking a long stride forward and bodily lifting up a drunk who was weaving towards Hiroko and setting him down again, out of her path, with a quick pat on the shoulder. He was unaware she had seen his entire character in that gesture. 'It wasn't easy to leave her, but my brothers were all fighting or trying to farm between the landmines and I couldn't earn enough in Karachi for everyone. So '93 I came here. And I haven't seen any of them since. My brothers, my wife. She had a son six months after I said goodbye to her. She knew it was happening before I left, but she didn't want to make it harder for me to go. So it's not so bad, leaving. I'll see my son, my wife. The light of Afghanistan. It's not so bad?'

He looked uncertainly at Hiroko, who found herself wanting to cry.

36.

Three days earlier, just outside Kandahar, two Pathan men stepped out of a jeep, reaching for the guns beneath its seats before their feet had touched the ground. To the pa.s.senger in the back seat, head moving side to side, the men appeared sectioned into many pieces the effect as disorienting as it was disturbing.

One of the men looked around the compound into which they'd driven, silent in the mid-afternoon sun.

'It's safe,' he called out to the figure in the back seat.

The cloaked figure stumbled out, attempting to pull off the giant blue shuttlec.o.c.k while disembarking, an endeavour which resulted in a sprawl on the mud floor and a cry of pain.

'Slow down,' one of the men laughed. 'You've had it on for nearly ten hours. Another thirty seconds won't kill you.'

Still in the dust, Raza pulled off the burkha tugging furiously at its constricting grip around his head and threw it to one side. Lying back on his elbows, he breathed in the air, choking slightly on it, but smiling all the same as his eyes swivelled this way and that and the slight breeze touched his skin.

'Come. Have some tea,' the taller of the men said, walking to one of the mud houses.

'No, no. I don't have time.' He stood up, holding out the burkha to the shorter man. 'Thanks for the disguise.'

'Thanks for the lift,' the man said. He gestured at the burkha. 'Keep it. You may still need it.'

'Thank you.' Raza slung the cloth so innocuous now over his shoulder. 'Though I'm not sure I wouldn't rather be captured by the Americans.'

A woman dressed as Raza had been a few minutes ago stepped out of one of the houses, her head angled in Raza's direction. He looked at her, imagined her chequered view of him, wondered if she had been watching from the window when he wrenched off the burkha and threw it into the dust had there been an instant when she imagined it was the act of a woman? He looked quickly away before his glance could be misconstrued. Or correctly construed. He felt he might go mad if he didn't soon see a woman's face, or hear a woman's voice.

'After you've had some tea, I can drive with you to the shrine,' the man beside him was saying. 'Hazaras aren't popular here, not even those who speak Pashto as beautifully as you.'

It was the first time the word 'Hazara' had entered the conversation. Near the start of his journey he had found the two men walking away from a car which had snapped its axle in a ditch and offered them a ride to their homes on the outskirts of Kandahar. After just a few minutes in their company he knew that he need only reveal he was hiding from the Americans in order to make allies of them.

'You've been travelling long enough,' Raza said. 'But I'll be back to take advantage of your offer of dinner.'

A few minutes later after gulping down a cup of green tea; a quicker process than refusing a Pathan's hospitality he was driving out of the compound, tongue and throat burning, away from Kandahar. Twenty years ago, in Sohrab Goth, in highway restaurants, in the cab of the truck decorated with the dead Soviet, Raza had listened to Abdullah rhapsodise about the beauties of his city the emerald in the desert whose fruit trees bore poems, whose language was the sweetness of ripe figs. But Raza's brief glimpse of Kandahar had shown him only dust, fierceness and a month after the Taliban's defeat not a single unshrouded woman.

The drive to the Baba Wali shrine was even more tortuous than the drive to Kandahar's outskirts had been. Given a choice between seeing a woman and seeing an American-style highway Raza wasn't sure which he would choose. Everywhere, remnants of the American bombing campaign a door standing unsupported in a field of bricks as though it were a miracle crop; craters in the road, indiscriminate as a meteorite shower; black metal shaped like a jeep in a headstand. He wondered if a burkha-clad woman standing near the jeep when it scorched might have a mesh tattooed on her face. In these ways he had been thinking of his mother almost constantly on the road to Kandahar. For some reason she had become part of the ache of losing Harry, though he really couldn't understand what one thing had to do with the other.

When he finally reached the shrine his first act, on getting out of the jeep, was to throw himself down on the ground and roll around. Gra.s.s! Actual green, tickling gra.s.s. He pulled a fistful out of the ground and rubbed it on his face, his arms, along the back of his neck before stepping on to the marble terrace which surrounded the airy shrine with its turquoise domes. Here, at last, a tiny glimpse of the world Abdullah held on to, the lost beauty which had allowed him to contemplate grotesque violence. It was not the shrine with the many-coloured tiles to which Raza paid attention or of which Abdullah had talked when he spoke of coming here each Friday with his family before the Soviets cleft them from the body of the saint they had venerated for generations. Instead, Abdullah had talked about the surrounding orchards, the fleet river and the mountains beyond, which, his brothers used to tell him, were the ridged backs of slumbering monsters.

Raza removed his shoes and socks, and walked across the marble tiles, the shrine at his back and the Arghandab River before him. As opposed to Kandahar, there was still enough here to suggest what it might once have been. A chequerboard of green-and-brown fields, the green sharp and rich; beyond, the sunstruck river and, further, through the haze of the afternoon, mountains carved into a cloudless sky.

A policeman was the first to come up to Raza and ask who he was and what he was doing there.

'The mujahideen who taught me how to fire a gun venerated Baba Wali,' Raza said.

The policeman nodded, and left him alone.

A few minutes later, another man half his face caved in approached Raza.

'You knew a mujahideen who came here?'

'Yes. Can you help me find his family? I owe him a debt I must repay.'

The man scratched the cheek which still remained.

'Perhaps. You're Hazara?'

'No. I'm not Afghan.'

The man stood waiting for more. Raza turned away from him and continued looking at the view.

'His family were farmers near here. They came every Friday to this shrine. He was Abdullah Durrani, son of Haji Mohammed Durrani. There were five brothers, all of them mujahideen. The eldest became a martyr in the first year of the Soviet occupation when a MiG fired on the convoy of arms he was transporting.' He knew how discourteous he was being in refusing to reveal anything about himself, but his mind was past sifting out what could and couldn't be safely said.

The man went away, and Raza sat down on the cool tiles, shaded by the shrine, and thought of Harry.

The policeman came back to give him a cup of water.

He was watching a spider crawl across the floor recalling Harry asking him about the story of the spider in Islam which Sajjad had told Konrad and Konrad had told Hiroko and Hiroko had told Ilse who told Harry when someone called his name. It was a man with a hooked nose, steely hair and a full beard down to his chest.

'Raza Hazara,' the man said again, and Raza remembered the unexpected youthfulness of his smile the day he'd driven the two boys to the mujahideen camp. Now everything about him was old. 'Why did you tell that man you're not an Afghan?'

'The Americans will be looking for you,' Raza said, standing up to feel less intimidated. He was surprised to find he was taller than Abdullah's brother. What was his name? 'I mean, they're looking for the man who called me . . . yesterday.' It seemed much longer ago than that. 'They think he you, they think you are involved with the murder of an American.'

The man laughed.

'The Americans aren't very good at finding people they're looking for in Afghanistan. Why do they think this? Were you involved with the murder of an American?'

Raza thought of Harry laughing with him at the contractors in their body armour, which they only took off to sunbathe at which vulnerable time the guards on the watchtower were doubled.

'Yes,' he said.

'Well done. You came to find me to tell me this? That they're looking for me? It's no problem. I used a public call office the man who runs it is an old friend. We bear scars from the same battle. Besides, this is Kandahar. No one here will help the Americans. We aren't like you Hazara.'

'You're Taliban?' It came out blunt and to Raza's ears accusing.

The man shrugged, something in the gesture calling Abdullah to mind.

'I'm twenty years too old for them. I'm a farmer. Wait here-' He entered the shrine, and Raza watched him pray by the grave of the Sufi a sight that made him lower his own head and mumble 'Surah Fateha', though not for anyone who'd been dead hundreds of years.

'You know who loves to come here?' said Abdullah's brother Ismail, that was his name! 'Abdullah's son.'

'He has a son?'

'His name is Raza.' Ismail nodded at Raza's look of confusion. 'Yes, named after the friend who Abdullah betrayed when he was just a boy. Raza our Raza has never met his father, but when they speak on the phone once a month Abdullah says tell me when your hand is big enough to fit around the largest Baba Wali pomegranate.' He gestured towards the grove of pomegranate trees alongside the terrace. 'So every week our Raza comes here, sometimes sneaks off on his own though now that the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are back in power he's forbidden to leave the house without being accompanied. He's a very beautiful boy, praise be to Allah, though in these days perhaps that's a curse.'